Mark Reviews Movies: MOONFALL

Moonfall, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 3, 2022

That Moonfall, which posits a scenario in which the moon spontaneously begins a collision course with Earth, doesn't make a lick of sense is beside the point. This is a very silly movie about weird conspiracy theories, a genocidal artificial intelligence, and a tale of the origins of life on this planet that, in terms of the ludicrous, gives a particular science-fiction-based religion (for tax purposes, at least) some stiff competition. One has to be very clever or very much the opposite to devise a story such as this one. Either way, the resulting experience probably shouldn't be as dull and formulaic as the one we get here.

This is, in some respects, a fairly generic disaster movie, in that we witness cities, towns, and landscapes being demolished by a couple types of natural phenomena. Coastal cities flood as the tides are altered by the quickly encroaching moon, knocking around cars and boats, as if they're toys in a filling bathtub, and sending a massive tidal wave inland. As the moon gets closer to the Earth's atmosphere, large chunks of it break off and pummel the Rocky Mountains—and the rest of the world, we have to presume.

Another—and admittedly unique—disastrous spectacle has the passing moon exerting its gravitational force on the planet, so people (except for the main characters, conveniently), vehicles, and structures are pulled upward into the air. By the end, we learn that the upper part of the Chrysler Building has been launched all the way to Colorado, and if that's the case, there are likely chunks of skyscrapers littering all parts of the world. Given all of this information and seeing all of this devastation, it's a major miracle—or a cheap contrivance—that there's any remnant of civilization or any significant population of humanity left to save after a certain point in the moon's movement toward Earth.

There's more than a little bit of gumption in the way the screenplay by Spenser Cohen, director Roland Emmerich, and Harald Kloser works around all of its apparent errors and/or inconsistencies in physics and/or logic. One of the three people who eventually try to stop the moon is KC Houseman (John Bradley), an amateur scientist who figures out the moon has changed its orbit before NASA. He mildly chides a couple of NASA scientists who, like the more logically minded among the audience, point out that what's happening on account of the moon is scientifically impossible. Since the moon is actually a hollow mega-structure built by aliens (Yes, you read that correctly), KC insists that their science is useless now.

Stop nitpicking, the screenwriters quickly announce with this incredibly wacky reason to toss science out the window, and just enjoy the chaos. If only the screenwriters had put as much thought into everything else—the characters, the plot, building intriguing setpieces around that chaos—as they did into inventing a justification for why nothing makes much sense, the movie might have been on to something.

Instead, after an extended bit of expository delaying (which sets up some broken families for two heroes and a lot of pretty foolish conspiracy junk), the narrative is eventually divided in two. On one side, KC, disgraced astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), and acting NASA director Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) make a desperate effort to fly to the moon on an old space shuttle. Their mission is to destroy a giant swarm of artificial intelligence, which is about as vague and bland a villainous presence as it sounds. Meanwhile Brian's teenage son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) and Jo's young son Jimmy (Zayn Maloney), along with the latter's nanny Michelle (Wenwen Yu), encounter various disasters, as well as a ridiculously persistent gang of thieves, on their way to the safety of a top-secret military base in the Rockies.

If it's possible, the stuff on Earth—with its repetitive threats and its narrow scope of destruction—might be less convincing than what happens on and inside the moon, where our heroes discover humanity's forebears and the nature of a cosmic war that's older than our planet. The latter at least possesses an air of mystery to accompany the silliness, although both inevitably fall into patterns of lazy action (an incoherent chase across crumbling and floating terrain on Earth and haphazard one among some alien technology inside the moon) and cheap melodrama.

The problem with Moonfall isn't that it's dopey. It's that the movie doesn't embrace how dopey it could be and, as a result, is simply, predictably dull.

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