Over the course of his almost four-decade career, Roland Emmerich is a filmmaker who has become synonymous with big-budget, CG-infused epics whose screenplays often challenge the laws of space and time. Few moviegoers who saw “The Day After Tomorrow,” “2012” or even “White House Down” thought they were anything more than overblown extravaganza and a nice escape from the monotony of the real world. Frankly, isn’t that why many of us go to the movies in the first place? And, to be fair, Emmerich’s tent pole films have often been so over-the-top and silly they’ve actually crossed over into a category of camp blockbusters such as his breakout, “Independence Day.” Unfortunately, Emmerich’s latest endeavor, “Moonfall,” isn’t one of those movies.
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From any perspective, “Moonfall” is simply beyond ridiculous, but what’s absurd about it isn’t the concept that the moon is a man-made structure sent to our solar system billions of years ago, or that an alien artificial intelligence is trying to destroy it in order to wipe humanity from the universe. That’s almost grounded realism compared to, say, Thanos’ snap in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. No, what is unintentionally laughable about Emmerich’s latest, is the secondary storylines that are just batshit insane considering the Earth is weeks, days, or minutes away from total destruction.
There is way too much to unpack in this review, even for a two-hour film, but the basics are this: A decade ago, two NASA astronauts, Jo Fowler (Halle Berry, get that coin) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson, wink next time), are victims of an alien attack on one of the last space shuttle missions. The U.S. government covers up the alien aspect of the event and blames the death of a third astronaut on Harper’s leadership. A decade later, the former American hero is now divorced, is about to be evicted from his L.A. apartment (with a great view, mind you), and has an 18-year-old son (Charlie Plummer, utterly wasted), who is a borderline juvenile delinquent. Meanwhile, a low-level conspiracy theorist, K.C. Houseman (John Bradley, the not-so-funny comic relief), discovers that the moon has veered from its orbit and could impact the Earth imminently. He randomly learns that Harper will be speaking to students at the Griffith Observatory (very much a set built on a Montreal sound stage) and he crashes the party hoping that anyone will pay attention to his findings.
What follows is a grab bag of Harper scrounging through a dumpster, military deception, state secrets (Donald Sutherland, why not!), gravity-defying ocean waves, a ludicrous car chase that seems like a terrible excuse for Lexus product placement, and more melodramatic personal beef than anyone could give a rat’s ass about with a giant moon ripping the world apart. And if maybe the movie, Berry, and Wilson didn’t take it all so seriously that might turn out to be much more entertaining than it deserves to be. Instead, the celebrated actors throw out lines that are so bad you’ll unintentionally laugh and wonder why they aren’t laughing along with you. At one point, Fowler has practically begged Harper to take part in a potentially planet-saving mission and he reacts with a deadpan “Look, I’ve got my own problems” line that is almost on the level of an “SNL” skit (honestly, Andy Samberg or Mikey Day could have gotten a much bigger laugh with it because they at least would have recognized how preposterous it is).
In theory, Emmerich’s spectacle should be so entertaining you shouldn’t care about these silly subplots. The movie should easily fall in the “it’s so bad, it’s good territory.” The problem is Emmerich and his co-screenwriters Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen continually double down on plotlines that even network television execs find cliche in 2022. Worse, the audience won’t care about any of these machinations either.
It’s all a bit quizzical as Emmerich has a proven cinematic eye and knows how to pace these sorts of films. It may be bloated, but “Moonfall” always feels like it’s moving at a somewhat brisk pace. And the filmmaker’s greatest talent is collaborating with visual effects teams to craft images that somehow get seared in your brain. Sure, he returns to his deep apocalyptic well for “Moonfall” (you can never decimate New York City too many times), but there are still enough moments that make you take a breath or raise an eyebrow. You may get so sucked into the visual spectacle that you stop rooting for the Moon to win (the thought will cross your mind) and hope our self-centered hero, Harper, somehow survives this mess. Even if it’s unclear if he even wants to. [C-]
“Moonfall” opens nationwide tomorrow.