Just before Christmas, Adam McKay released his all-star doomsday farce Don’t Look Up, in which the political and media classes’ inability to recognise the dangers of a coming mega-comet was indicative of climate-crisis denial.
Unfortunately, that well-intentioned film turned out to be the celeb-comedy equal of Gal Gadot’s Imagine video. Now we get Moonfall.
However, its supporters said that those who opposed it were inevitably implicated in the problem since they were journalists, and that they didn’t care about the environment. This liberal-arts version of Trumpian journalist-hatred was all the more peculiar because the majority of people voicing it were themselves journalists.
None of these difficulties apply to Moonfall, a film that belongs to the well-established but humbler “disaster” genre, which paradoxically conveys its lack of genuine concern by its deadly serious tone paired with a tacitly agreed-upon happy conclusion, as opposed to satire ending in tragedy. This strangely leaden new action extravaganza comes from Roland Emmerich, a longstanding maestro of these end-of-the-world-but-not-really pictures. However, the formulaic stupidity, which is sometimes part of the delight, becomes tiresome here.
The moon is said to be rotating away from its axis towards us, creating environmental disaster on Earth. An elderly Nasa employee labouring in a basement, unsurprisingly played by Donald Sutherland, acknowledges this dreadful fact in hushed tones. Patrick Wilson, widely regarded as the Leslie Nielsen of his generation, plays maverick astronaut Brian Harper, who was unfairly fired for alleged incompetence in the destruction of a satellite ten years before, despite the fact that it was his heroism that saved the life of his colleague Jo Fowler (Halle Berry), who is now a Nasa big cheese.
Meanwhile, a goofy British eccentric with bizarre views about the moon is gaining popularity on the internet: This is KC Houseman, as played by John Bradley (Game of Thrones’ Samwell Tarly).
As the moon approaches, with CGI waves cascading over buildings, Nasa and the joint chiefs swallow their pride and realise they’ll have to send a special mission of freethinking heroes and heroines up to the moon to sort things out: Brian, Jo, and funny KC. Meanwhile, back on Earth, their stepfamilies are having stressful adventures.
It’s meant to be funny; it’s not trying to be anything else, and it’s certainly not attempting to be modern satire. However, the whimsical and rather Jules Verne-esque disclosures don’t breathe fresh life into the catastrophe genre; rather, it feels as if the shark has leaped over the moon, culminating in hours and hours of serious nonsense. Despite its flaws, Don’t Look Up was at least addressing a genuine and contemporary issue. The moon has dropped with a dreadful clang in this film.
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By the time Moonfall begins to assemble its key trio of characters in order for them to become its heroes, the early deadly ramifications of the Moon’s descent have already begun, and for a brief period, the film appears to be heading in the correct direction. The Moon’s increased proximity to the Earth, as well as the altered gravitational pull between the two celestial bodies, begin to emerge as both worrisome and promising Emmerichian set pieces, such as the abrupt flooding of North America’s shores as sea levels rise and become strangely unpredictable.
When Moonfall becomes too preoccupied with being interesting, it repeatedly stops to introduce multiple thinly fleshed out characters, such as Harper’s wayward son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) and Fowler’s military general ex-husband Doug (Eme Ikwuakor), who serve no real purpose other than to deliver stilted lines that pull focus away from what audiences actually come to see in these types of movies.
Moonfall is disappointingly lacking on continuous passages that make you feel just how awful and truly hopeless that type of situation would actually seem as a movie about the Moon appearing deciding to drive itself into the Earth and humanity battling to preserve itself from catastrophe. While you may anticipate Moonfall to have an almost Majora’s Mask-like ever-present sense of dread, it really has more in common with Breath of the Wild: a game in which you can hang about and do nothing until the wicked Moon comes back around on an expedited timetable to ruin your peace and quiet.
Moonfall nearly appears to develop a new degree of self-awareness about how pathetic its internal sense of logic is in its last third. Rather than correcting course, Emmerich and co-writers Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen’s script throws on even more silliness that doesn’t work as stupid fun since the film as a whole is hollow and airless. While aspiring conspiracy theorists may like the couple of bones Moonfall throws at them in its chase of subreddit celebrity with the anti-science crowd, it’s safe to say the film is a miss and then some, which is surprising considering how simple a target this should have been to strike.
