Moonfall

Roland Emmerich puts the lunar into luna(r)tic with a daft but not entirely disagreeable slice of sci-fi hokum.

Most of us take the moon for granted. Yet without it our climate would be adversely affected, birds would be unable to navigate their migrations and we’d lose our 24-hour day. Roland Emmerich, the ‘Master of Disaster’, now returns to his favourite genre with a multitude of CGI specialists to depict our world succumbing to the usual side effects of Armageddon. After uncountable millennia, the moon’s orbit has suddenly shifted and the satellite is heading towards its mother planet. Yet as the naysayers make rhetorical excuses for what is going down up there, a lone scientific nerd has calculated the inevitable. However, the trick, as in Don’t Look Up, is to get people to listen to him…

As the scriptwriters attempt to modify the viewer’s disbelief with buzzy phrases like “a self-aware, self-replicating singularity” and “the roche limit,” the world’s most beautiful 55-year-old woman, a Nasa director (Halle Berry) declares, “we’re not prepared for this.” Well, of course not. It transpires that Earth has just three weeks before the collision of worlds (cf. Don’t Look Up), and so a variety of human interest subplots are spun into place.

Nobody loves a day of reckoning more than Emmerich, whose CV includes such apocalyptic scenarios as The Noah's Ark Principle, Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 and Independence Day: Resurgence. And so here we have high tides washing through coastal cities, meteorites scorching mountain tops and, according to one news channel, a lot of looting, “which has become a national pastime in the United Kingdom.” Well, we all know how the British love a good looting in times of global uncertainty. Apparently, the only real safe place is Colorado, which becomes the escape hatch for most of the film’s jittery characters (of course, at the time of scripting, Emmerich was not to foresee the catastrophic wildfires and historic blizzards that have plagued the 38th state).

For all the foolishness, Moonfall is not without its entertainment value. A saving grace is the Mancunian actor John Bradley (Game of Thrones), who plays the conspiracy theorist KC Houseman, constantly punctuating the doom with self-deprecating levity. However, it’s hard for Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson to inject much credibility into their one-dimensional characters, but they are easy on the eye and do convey an appropriate degree of apprehension. It’s not entirely clear whether we’re laughing with or at the film, but it’s always fun to watch the digital demise of New York City (again).

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Michael Peña, Charlie Plummer, Kelly Yu, Donald Sutherland, Carolina Bartczak, Eme Ikwuakor, Maxim Roy, Zayn Maloney, Stephen Bogaert, Azriel Dalman, Ava Weiss, Hazel Nugent, Randy Thomas.  

Dir Roland Emmerich, Pro Harald Kloser and Roland Emmerich, Screenplay Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen, Ph Robby Baumgartner, Pro Des Kirk M. Petruccelli, Ed Adam Wolfe and Ryan Stevens Harris, Music Thomas Wanker [sic] and Harald Kloser, Costumes Mario Davignon, Sound Paul O'Bryan and Ryan Stevens Harris. 

Huayi Brothers International/Huayi Tencent Entertainment International/Centropolis Entertainment/Street Entertainment/AGC Studios- Entertainment Film Disttributors.
130 mins. USA/UK/China/Canada. 2022. US and UK Rel: 4 February 2022. Cert. 12A.