Moonfall (PG-13)
The moon is suddenly headed toward collision or something with Earth in Moonfall, a movie that is both even dumber than that sounds and yet somehow not nearly as dumb as it needs to be.
Lean in to your dumbness, you dumb dumb movie — was my feeling throughout.
Astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) is kicked out of NASA after an incident in space results in the death of one of his crew members. His public downfall also leads to his getting divorced, being estranged from his kid, going broke and even cutting contact with his former close coworker Jocinda Fowl (Halle Berry), who was on the doomed mission but was knocked unconscious and can’t back up his story that the incident was caused not by human error but by a Space Thing.
What kind of Space Thing, you ask? Well, the thing that causes the destruction to Brian’s mission looks like a floaty cloud made of pencil lead bits and ball bearings. He last sees it in the vicinity of the moon and then — then nothing. He’s drummed out of NASA and labeled a nutcase and nobody ever mentions the Thing again for like a decade until the events of this movie start with NASA scientists figuring out that the moon’s orbit has changed. Jocinda is now number two at NASA and wants the team to figure out what’s up with the moon and why it seems to be suddenly getting closer to Earth, which will eventually cause chunks of the moon to ram into Earth. Also she’d like everybody to keep quiet about it for a bit.
What she doesn’t know is that at the same time, amateur astronomer/professional pastrami sandwich maker KC Houseman (John Bradley), long the holder of some really wild theories about the moon, has also figured out that it has changed its orbit and is heading toward Earth. He tweets it out and suddenly the world is in chaos at our impending destruction while NASA and the military work on competing ideas for preventing the disaster.
Naturally, KC, Brian and Jocinda eventually come together to tackle the moon crisis. All three have family situations that lead to harrowing near-misses in “meanwhile” scenes — or at least they would if we ever really got to know anybody’s kids and moms or if any of them behaved in recognizably human ways, which they don’t.
I have so many questions about the making of this movie. I want to know the total backstory, soup to nuttiness — starting with how did Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley end up in this movie together? My theory: somebody challenged Roland Emmerich (this movie’s director and co-writer) to make a movie starring whoever happened to be the guests on, say, Jimmy Fallon one night. Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and guy from Game of Thrones feels like a solid late night show lineup; please don’t ever tell me if I’m wrong about this because I like this theory and anything else would just make me feel sad for these actors.
You know that expression “building the plane while we’re flying it”? This movie feels like it was thought up as it went along with holes for dialogue and plot to be filled in later — but “later” never came. Like, Emmerich was standing over one of his co-writers saying “come on, just print out the script for this scene” and the writer was saying, “But it’s not finished. The dialogue doesn’t sound like normal human speech and we don’t really understand what motivates anybody’s characters or what their relationships to each other are” and Emmerich says “So what? We’ll just make the moon bigger and say some nonsense about gravity, no one will notice” and that’s how every scene came to be. (Though I could also see some kind of Mad Libs situation being at play.)
I won’t spoil the exact nature of the moon as presented here, mostly because it’s stupid, but I will say that it wasn’t what I was sort of rooting for, which was giant space egg holding some kind of about-to-hatch space lizard. Or chicken, space chicken would also be fun. It is much more muddled than that, with some interesting ideas but nothing ever well-developed enough to be even as “just go with it” fun as, like, The Day After Tomorrow and its whole ice age thing or 2012 and its worldwide flood. Again, you suspect the writers were writing page three while they were printing page two and the cast was shooting page one — with no chance to go back and fill in details or massage story points to flow more smoothly.
And yet, none of this would have necessarily mattered if the movie had really leaned into how dumb it is and let the characters be as ridiculous as the situation. Remember the various people who died in ridiculous ways in Independence Day? Or Woody Harrelson as the wild-eyed volcano guy in 2012? This movie needs some of that energy. Of the core group, only Bradley really seems to understand the exact speed to be at. Berry (who was great in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum and knows how to be awesome in nonsense) and Wilson feel as though they’re in different movies — different from the movie they’re in and possibly different from each other. Everybody in this movie needs to be thinking “what would Geostorm-era Gerard Butler do” and then do that, but bigger and louder.
I fully expected and wanted Moonfall to be really dumb. I’m completely uninterested in gritty, realistic apocalypse movies right now. I want space chickens to hatch from the moon or whatever and I want the saving of all of humanity to come down to three randos in some patched together old space shuttle. So crank the volume on that silliness all the way up, movie. At the current muted and muddled level, Moonfall is just the kind of dumb you wonder why you even bothered to watch, not the kind of dumb you want to watch again and again. C-
Rated PG-13 for violence, disaster, strong language and some drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Roland Emmerich with a screenplay by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen, Moonfall is two hours and 10 minutes long and distributed by Lionsgate in theaters.
Featured photo: Moonfall.
