Moonfall

I'm not going to pretend I understood everything that happened in Moonfall.  I think the only way you could is if you're one of the credited writers.  Here is a movie that seems to be made up on the fly, and by talented people who just didn't care if the story they were telling made the least bit of sense.  I can imagine how a movie like that could sound like fun, but in this case, it doesn't have quite the energy to pull off such a goofy and nonsensical venture. 

The question for the critic reviewing such a film is,  how do you rate it as being a success or not?  I can answer by saying that the movie and the cast never quite pick up the speed to sell a movie like this.  The Earth is being destroyed, the Moon is falling out of its orbit, oh, and the moon may actually be made by aliens who are ancestors to the human race, and it is in danger by sentient A.I. that wants to doom us all.  All this happens, and the movie still thinks we care about subplots about estranged families, a teenage son proving that he's not a screw up, and a foreign exchange student who's been shoehorned into the film to help increase its chances at the box office in China.  This leads to a weird disconnect between a bunch of crazy, out there stuff that left me with a goofy grin on my face, and bland character-driven drama that reads like it was written by an Automatic Screenplay Machine.

The movie's director and co-writer is Roland Emmerich, who has a lot of experience with big budget disaster films (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) and aliens (Independence Day, Stargate).  He tries to combine the two here, and they just never connect.  It doesn't help that most of the human cast who are on Earth having to deal with constantly switching gravitational force and oxygen slowly dissipating treat these calamities almost as if they're an annoyance than a cataclysm.  There are even moments where the actors seem to forget to react to the special effects going on around them.  They actually seem to be more annoyed when some looters steal their car than the fact that the Moon is about to crash into our planet.  The heroes on Earth are led by young Sonny Harper (Charlie Plummer), a teenage bad boy who comes across as someone who was born to loiter outside of convenience stores most of his life.  He's been a screw up most of his life, and has even been in jail after a police chase, but gosh darn it, he's not going to disappoint his dad this time as he leads his family and a few friends to safety while the world is falling apart.

Sonny's dad is Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), a disgraced former hero astronaut at NASA who lost all credibility 10 years ago when he tried to tell his superiors that a strange alien mass was the result of a casualty during a space mission, not human error.  Now, as the Moon's orbit is getting closer to the Earth, he gets the chance to go back into space and be the hero he was always destined to be.  He's accompanied in his mission by one of his old crew mates, Jocinda (Halle Berry, given little to do, despite getting first billing), and a conspiracy theorist named K.C. (John Bradley from Game of Thrones), who serves as the "kook who was right all along" character that Emmerich loves to put in his films, and as the comic relief when needed.  They're the ones who learn that the Moon is really a megastructure that was built by ancient aliens, and that said aliens are where human life originated.  

Are you surprised to learn that even though Moonfall spends a lot of time explaining all of this, it still fails to actually make much sense?  Again, I could probably get behind all of this, if the movie had more of a sense of fun to itself, which it does from time to time.  I can only imagine the smiles an actor like Donald Sutherland was hiding when he did his one-scene cameo, where he gets to recite the immortal line, "One small step for man, one giant leap...Yadda, Yadda...".  The problem with this is not how goofy it is, it's that it just can't balance the goofiness with its efforts to actually make us care.  This either needed to be a parody of disaster movies, or have a more knowing sense of humor.  The movie is hollow at its emotional core, and all the out-there plot developments in the world are not going to build interest.  If you have a car chase that takes place when the Earth's gravitational pull is being altered, it should not be boring, yet somehow, this film accomplishes just that.

A movie like this should be a total guilty pleasure, but because it never engages, it's simply a very silly film that doesn't leave the impression you would think.  Moonfall either needed to leave all sense behind, or to have a strong emotional core, and I am kind of at a loss as to which would have helped more.  A movie like this should not suffer from such an uncertain fate. 

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