Roland Emmerich is gearing up to return to his roots as a master of giant, epic-scale disaster movies with “Moonfall,” and he’s taking Patrick Wilson with him.
The Hollywood Reporter broke the news about Wilson, who has been cast as the film’s protagonist, a “disgraced former NASA astronaut whose last mission, which ended in tragedy, holds a clue about the impending catastrophe.” In addition, the report includes news that Charlie Plummer will play Wilson’s teenage soon.
As our own Charles Barfield so beautifully described it, 2020 is so cuckoo bananas that the simple idea of a ragtag group of misfits being the only ones capable of saving the world by going to outer space and blowing an asteroid while Aerosmith plays in the background doesn’t sound exciting anymore. So what is Roland Emmerich’s solution? Replace the asteroid with the actual Moon coming to kill Earth, and probably have the characters land on the Moon to blow it up, not caring about the consequences for the planet?
The film also stars Halle Berry as a former colleague of Wilson’s character, while Josh Gad plays your obligatory eccentric genius that deduces that the literal Moon is falling out of its orbit and will crash with the Earth. So you can expect Gad to run around while being belittled by every other character in the movie until they realize he was right all along.
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It’s basically “Armageddon,” but before you start complaining, just remember that the Michael Bay disaster flick received a Criterion Collection release, an honor not even “The Day After Tomorrow” obtained.
Lionsgate is hoping for a North American release in 2021.
Here’s the synopsis for “Moonfall:”
In Moonfall, a mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit around Earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it. With mere weeks before impact, and against all odds, a ragtag team launches an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love and risking everything to land on the lunar surface and save our planet from annihilation.