By Elias Savada.
If you want an ear-smashing IMAX presentation, you’ll get one…. If you’re a reasonable person, you should avoid being in its vicinity.”
Critics haven’t taken kindly to much of the escapist entertainment from German-born producer-director-writer Roland Emmerich. So, why should his latest be any different? It’s not. “This is a whole ‘nother level of insane,” the film’s trailer tells up right up front.
Known for his oversized, big-budget films laden with special effects, he’s been servicing Hollywood with some ludicrous stuff since he crafted Stargate and Independence Day into worldwide hits 25 years ago. Sure, he has an occasional dud (2015’s Stonewall and 2011’s Anonymous), but studio executives never tire of hiring him to create some lame-brain story for the popcorn-munching masses. Why? They. Make. Money. As a disaster master, he’s been responsible for about $4 billion from 14 features he’s directed since 1992’s Universal Soldier.
And now comes his $150 million Moonfall, an action-packed spectacle opening against the latest installment in the R-rated prank fest series Jackass (costing a mere $10 million). It won’t surprise me if the latter heads to the top of the opening weekend box office chart. It’s silly versus eye-popping entertainment, and I think we all need a good laugh. Yet, even with covid still riding shotgun, maybe audiences will embrace a stupid script over some reckless shenanigans. It’s your call, world.
Hey, I really liked Independence Day and have watched it repeatedly. I’m a Stargate fan, too, which Emmerich crafted with Dean Devlin, spawning a television series franchise (with rumors of a reboot often in the air). Moonfall follows a similar us vs. them plot outline as in I.D., and there’s evidence of thievery amongst characters in this new endeavor. Is that Halle Berry’s intrepid character spouting some dialogue reminiscent of the inspirational words uttered by President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman)?
So, yeah, Emmerich’s films never review well, yet he keeps churning out one outlandish hit after another. In Moonfall, our planet is close to extinction (again!) as the supposedly stable moon decides to take a totally unnatural detour that plays havoc like we’ve never seen before. Massive destruction, gravity waves, and unwanted dialogue. Just like in his previous earth-in-peril escapades. This one’s written by Emmerich with his frequent collaborator Harald Kloser (who co-composed the overloud music with Thomas Wander), and Spenser Cohen.
The film starts with a prologue in which three American astronauts are fixing a satellite in 2011 while shooting the breeze. When a mysterious black particle mass (think Venom) smashes into them, only two survive and they barely make it back to Earth. Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson, having survived Emmerich’s Midway) find themselves mercilessly castigated by government bureaucrats, who looked at the fiasco as “human error.” Cut to a decade later, Fowler is second-in-command at NASA and Harper is divorced, despondent, disheveled, and debt-ridden.
Meanwhile, KC Houseman (Game of Thrones’ John Bradley, the best thing in this whole misadventure), a discredited scientist and avowed megastructurist — wait, is that what they call people who build Lego worlds? — has discovered that the moon’s gone awry and is wobbling downward. Uh oh. We’ve got three weeks, maybe.
Time to cue in all the inane subplots. Houseman and his aging mom, Fowler and her ex-husband, who is one of the cadre of military commanders who only think of one word in dealing with the situation: NUKE! Also along is Jimmy (Zayn Maloney), Fowlers’ shared child and the ten-year-old’s caretaker, Michelle (Kelly Yu, offering up some appeal for her fans in China and Canada). Harper’s teenaged and troubled son, Sonny (Charlie Plummer), gets arrested after an OJ Simpson car chase stunt, and is later caught off guard by some carjackers (the worst of these little subordinate stories). Naturally, despite all the panic going on, most of the extended family manage to find one other as the planet apparently gets salvaged after this 2-hour-plus mess winds down. Oh, Donald Sutherland makes such a brief appearance that he’s only got a few more seconds beyond those that have his name in the credits. I almost forgot.
As for Fowler, Harper, and Houseman, they end up aboard a relic of a spacecraft, pulled from a museum, and miraculously doing what the heroes do in these movies. Wait, you’re expecting a tragedy. Hah!
If you want an ear-smashing IMAX presentation, you’ll get one. The script is sparse, but the extensive VFX work will offer you plenty of eye candy.
If you believe the moon is made of green cheese, then Moonfall has spoiled that cheese, and that causes film poisoning. If you’re a reasonable person, you should avoid being in its vicinity. If the moon’s what Emmerich thinks it is, please suit up and exit the theater before it’s too late. Consider yourself warned.
Elias Savada is a movie copyright researcher, critic, craft beer geek, and avid genealogist based in Bethesda, Maryland. He helps program the Spooky Movie International Movie Film Festival, and previously reviewed for Film Threat and Nitrate Online. He is an executive producer of the horror film German Angst and the documentary Nuts! He co-authored, with David J. Skal, Dark Carnival: the Secret World of Tod Browning (a revised edition will be published by Centipede Press).
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