Director Roland Emmerich has made a career making films that center around a cataclysmic event that threatens to exterminate humanity unless a ragtag team of characters can prevent it.
He did that formula once with an alien invasion in Independence Day. Then he did it again with global warming in The Day After Tomorrow. Then he prepared us for the ultimate disaster movie with 2012.
Now he brings himself back into the disaster genre with Moonfall which plays like elements of the other three movies bordering on self-parody.
Halle Berry stars as Jo Harper, a former astronaut turned NASA director and Patrick Wilson as Brian Harper, a former disgraced former astronaut who now serves as a tour guide at the Griffith Observatory.
John Bradley costars as conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman who’s convinced that the moon is an infrastructure designed by an alien civilization that’s been showing signs of mysterious activity. He believes that the moon is now out of orbit and is in direct trajectory with the Earth. Naturally, everyone thinks he’s crazy.
K.C. decides to go public with the information as to what is causing the moon to move closer to Earth and that’s when all the special effects take over.
Soon all three of them are leading a mission to blow the moon off its course and when they get there, they’re introduced to a series of preposterous plot developments that at best try to mirror Christopher Nolan and at worst try to mirror M. Night Shyamalan. Emmerich’s somewhere in between.
Emmerich has always been one who makes A-movie spectacles out of B-movie scripts. He does incorporate a lot of cheesy dialogue and characters that are caricatures of his previous films and that might all serve as either a hindrance or an asset depending on how much of Emmerich’s films you can tolerate.
I’m in a place again where I will defend the indefensible. I can’t say this is a great movie for its genre. Its direction, writing, and especially acting are all cornball, and there were moments that made me laugh unintentionally, but I’ll also say that I was unreasonably satisfied.
Unlike Michael Bay or even to a somewhat lesser extent, Zack Snyder, Emmerich has the self-awareness to know what kind of movie he’s making and this one works in the silliest of senses.
Note: One character makes a pronouncement that the inside of the Moon is made up of produce. I guess that debunks the theory of it being made of cheese.
Grade: B
(Rated PG-13 for violence, disaster action, strong language, and some drug use.)
