There’s A 100% Chance Of A Earth-Shattering Moonfall
Roland Emmerich’s newest apocalypse is sheer lunar-cy
I saw Moonfall fully masked in a near-empty IMAX theater at 2 PM with my movie club, two gentlemen of impeccable cinematic tastes. This was our reunion after many months apart.
Moonfall is the sort of movie where the plot is cleverly hidden in the title (the moon! it falls!), and I had been looking forward to being clobbered by the sound and fury of gratuitous explosions for weeks. While I watched the movie, I was reminded of a classic poem that I will rewrite with apologies to Robert Frost:
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. But wait, there’s more, that’s not all Some say the world ends in a moonfall
That’s how I’d want to go, crushed by a celestial body. Moonfall brought out the romantic in me.
Since time immemorial, humanity has gazed at the silver face of the moon at night. She illuminates the darkness and conducts the tides. We take her for granted. And it takes a real artist to stare skyward at Earth’s cosmic companion and ask: “What if some mysterious malevolent force knocked the moon out of orbit and it crashed into New York City?”
That artist is filmmaker Roland Emmerich who has asked other probing questions in his movies like “what if aliens blew up the White House?” and “what if John Cusack drove a limo through L.A. during a city-destroying mega-earthquake?”
The German-born director is one of Hollywood’s most dependable architects of special effects-reinforced blockbusters. His action movies aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re solidly built. Emmerich knows how to compose bedlam. His apocalyptic mise-en-scene is flawless, every frame an intense give-and-take between a beautiful person and a gargantuan disaster.
His over-the-top 1998 Godzilla reboot is a giant monster masterpiece that has never been given the respect it richly deserves. Emmerich’s climate change disaster hit The Day After Tomorrow was ahead of its time even if it did feature multiple set-pieces utterly detached from scientific realism, including one where Jake Gyllenhaal somehow outruns a wave of lethal cold. What does that sentence mean? Exactly.
Stargate is worth rewatching, if you haven’t in a while, it’s the best movie ever made about an interdimensional portal to a planet populated by the aliens who build the ancient pyramids in Egypt. It’s classic Emmerich, as is 2012, another ‘Mother Nature goes mad” epic. That’s the one that stars John Cusack as a regular dude trying to save his family from God’s wrath. In that movie, the rich try to survive Armaggedon.
I don’t want to pigeonhole Emmerich, either. He’s surprisingly versatile. He’s just not a disaster movie director, he can also helm glossy, sentimental, extremely violent war flicks, too. His 2019 Midway about the war in the Pacific was exactly what it needed to be: a few patriotic speeches, a lot of airplanes buzzing, and machine guns rat-a-tatting.
The entertainment industry has a bad habit of ignoring its most creative members during their lifetime, so let’s appreciate Emmerich while we have him.
And there is something elegant about Moonfall. I think part of it is everyone involved isn’t embarrassed to be in this movie. When Patrick Wilson looks through the portal of his spacecraft to behold the runaway moon, he really sells it. You can see it in his eyes.
I’m not saying Moonfall isn’t garbage. I don’t think it will — or should — win any awards. It is a B-movie, but everything about Moonfall is elevated. It’s like ordering a hamburger at a fancy restaurant. The ingredients are all top-notch, starting with the special effects, followed by the stars and, of course, the director.
I would like to take this moment to point out that all burgers are good, greasy, sloppy, or served with a drizzle of truffle oil. It doesn't matter.
The screenplay is as confident as it is convoluted. It’s crammed with nonsensical sci-fi exposition and corny jokes and a ‘gravity wave’ that almost takes out a space shuttle, humanity’s last hope.
Three screenwriters are credited: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser, and Spenser Cohen, and one of them totally got drunk and watched too much YouTube one night. The moon, man, the moon isn’t the moon.
I don't want to ruin the plot of Moonfall for a few reasons, one of them being I don’t even know if I understand the core plot, really. I tried to describe the storyline to a friend who let me know they are never going to see Moonfall, and they looked at me like I had written QANON on my forehead in lipstick. I will say this: the mysterious force that pushes the moon towards the Earth is a real WTF?!? plot point, and I kinda loved it. Compared to the reigning box-office champs at Marvel, Moonfall is an unpredictable adventure. Even its many, MANY cliches are delightful and chuckle-worthy.
The real hero of Moonfall is a chubby, socially-awkward Elon Musk-loving conspiracy theorist. There are two other heroes like the aforementioned Patrick Wilson, the thinking man’s hunk, and the great Halle Berry, who is way too good for this movie but I am not complaining. I don’t know why she’s not in at least one (1) serious drama and one (1) CGI-heavy action movie every year.
Donald Sutherland has a cameo, and the 86-year-old is having a good time as a shadowy government puppet master. Michael Pena gets the evil stepdad role, and he finds a way to make that part interesting.
But it is Brit nerd John Bradley who serves as the emotional center of Moonfall and his character is a weird, lonely cat person. But you know what? Cat people are people too. So are incels, I guess, because Bradley’s character is kind of a harmless sexless man blob. That’s okay!
There are two ways to look at Moonfall. One, as an existential meditation on the end of the world. You know, man versus moonfall. The other way to look at Moonfall is it’s a movie about a crew of misfits who risk everything to set off a bomb in the heart of the moon that will save the planet. I prefer the latter.
In Moonfall, the Earth is showered with destructive moonrocks and torn apart by overpowering gravitational forces and while you don’t really see millions dying horrible deaths one can only assume millions are dying horrible deaths.
The mass destruction is part of the fun of Moonfall. I’m sure my opinion on that will change if I ever lose a loved one to an actual moonfall but until then, New York gets it, again. (Although I did notice that the Freedom Tower survives a shotgun blast of red hot moonrocks that obliterate most of Manhattan’s skyline.)
I should mention that while the job of stopping the moon from falling is given to NASA, they are helped by SpaceX™ and our friends, those lovable scamps known as The Chinese Communist Party. They lend NASA a space rover that looks to be more advanced than NASA’s rockets or the Space Shuttle that has to be pulled out of mothballs. Thanks, China. I guess if you want to make a sci-fi movie about a cosmic ball of death with a $140 million budget — in this day and age — you’re probably going to have to make some, um, rich friends. Capitalism!
The movie ends on a cliffhanger, so here’s hoping there are multiple sequels. Never let it be said Emmerich isn’t a man of vision. I hope a new Moonfall is in theaters soon. I have faith.
As I wrote, the IMAX where I saw Moonfall was near-empty. As I climbed the stairs to our preferred perch, I passed three affable, masked, elderly men having a hoot who had also decided to catch a 2 PM screening of a movie about the moon, falling. Clearly, these were time travelers. The ghosts of movie club future hurtling back in time to where it all began. Rad.
