Somewhere between producer Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure) and director Michael Bay (the lamentable Transformers series) there is Roland Emmerich, the gleeful and unapologetic German-born orchestrator of apocalyptic mass destruction. His primary run of name-brand, blockbuster, sci-fi actioners, let’s say from 1994’s Stargate to 2009’s 2012, were corny, absurd, character-thin (allowing Judd Hirsch to read his dialogue in a cartoonish Yiddish accent in ID4 should be punishable by watching Judd Hirsch read his dialogue in a cartoonish Yiddish accent in ID4) and downright fun. They’re filled with order-barking generals, science-adjacent mumbo-jumbo and improbable, death-defying escapes, and Emmerich’s gift is to deliver them all in outsized doses that stop just short of being too preposterous for even the most forgiving moviegoer to swallow. Meanwhile the effects, those city-burying tsunamis and skyscrapers frozen in ice, indulge the eye-bulging mouth-breather in all of us, leaving the viewer simultaneously horrified at the specter of a world frozen solid while compelling us to admit that, if Earth ever became a giant ice cube, it might be kinda neat.
It’s been a beat since Emmerich has scaled such paper-thin heights and, in the interim, moviegoers have been retrained to get their world-ending kicks from the Russo Brothers (Avengers: Endgame), Bong Joon-Ho (Snowpiercer), John Krasinski (A Quiet Place) and many other filmmakers whose balance of character, style and disaster porn are more sober-minded but no less enjoyable. Moonfall is Emmerich’s second recent attempt (after 2016’s Independence Day: Resurgence) to reclaim his throne, the old dog ready to remind us that no one knows how to kill a billion people and render Earth an uninhabitable wasteland better than he does. As a result, he fully overcompensates, giving us more of what didn’t work about his previous films and too much of what did. Moonfall is weapons-grade nonsense that severely tests our desire to go along for the ride no matter how ridiculous it gets. As audiences have gotten savvier and are demanding more from their End Times spectaculars, Emmerich’s films have only gotten stupider.
One of the hallmarks of a Roland Emmerich disaster film is that no matter how outlandish its premise, he takes it more seriously than we do. But even within the forgiving context of the genre, Moonfall is laughably preposterous (that says a lot considering Emmerich also directed Stonewall) and suffers from a lack of winking, self-aware humor. Instead, Emmerich operates as if he’s got something to prove, so he concocts a story of gargantuan scale where the moon breaking out of its orbit and crashing into Earth is one of its more plausible elements. Another hallmark of an Emmerich film is watching A-list actors try to keep a straight face as they attack a series of ever-goofier story complications. Halle Berry draws the short straw here as Jo Fowler, who we meet commanding a space shuttle mission while her “work husband” Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) effects a repair outside. After the duo engage in a faux-authentic, presumably endearing discussion about the lyrics to Toto’s “Africa”, the shuttle is attacked by an immense, worm-shaped swarm of tiny metallic whatevers emanating from the moon. When a third crewmember is lost in the melee, Brian takes the blame and is booted out of NASA.
Unlike other Emmerich films, Moonfall’s breakneck speed and ever-increasing levels of destruction can’t fully disguise, or compel us to ignore, its formulaic structure and stock characters. Especially the oddball conspiracy theorist who inevitably turns out to be right, an almost irresponsible characteristic for a hero considering the dangerous conspiracy theories currently polluting our news feeds. Grabbing the baton from ID4’s Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) we have KC Houseman (Games of Thrones alum John Bradley, because Josh Gad wasn’t available, nor was Simon Pegg, Jack Black or a Twister-era Philip Seymour Hoffman). KC is a university janitor and self-described “mega-structuralist” who believes the moon is as hollow as a Roland Emmerich screenplay. He bum-rushes Brian at the Griffith Observatory with his theory that not only is our closest celestial neighbor an empty shell constructed by some unknown alien force but it’s broken away from its orbit and is careening towards Earth.
With great alacrity and little concession to logic, KC and Brian find their way back to Jo, who is now a NASA big wig. While various grim-faced functionaries fretfully update us on the moon’s current position and talk of “Roche limits” and “gravity waves” Jo realizes that the only solution involves Brian piloting a shuttle towards the moon with Jo and, naturally, the part-time janitor and conspiracy theorist who suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome. And if the shuttle needs to be ready for launch in only 28 minutes, there is no scientific or logistical obstacle that’ll keep that from happening.
It’s always been one of Emmerich’s quainter notions that nothing brings a family together like the end of the world. Here the family drama is such a lackluster timewaster that one almost starts rooting for the destruction of Earth. Making their way across the chaos-filled landscape to a Colorado bunker in a beautifully apportioned Lexus are Brian’s son, Sonny, (Charlie Plummer), ex-wife, Brenda (Carolina Bartczak), her husband, Tom (Michael Peña), Jo’s son, Jimmy (Zayn Maloney) and his nanny, Michelle (Chinese-born actress and singer Kelly Yu, whose casting probably had absolutely, positively nothing to with securing funding and distribution in China). Jo’s ex-husband, Doug (Eme Ikwuakor), is a high-ranking officer whose main purpose is to spout the film’s most unintentionally funny line: when told that a desperate NASA is about to launch nukes towards the moon in a Hail Mary effort to save all life on Earth, he implores, “but my ex-wife is up there!”
What ultimately is happening on the moon will not be revealed here. Let’s just say Emmerich decided that his hyperactive yet ponderously dull parade of tidal waves, earthquakes and cheesy dialogue needed a dash of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact to add depth and meaning. But Moonfall doesn’t need either of those. It needs an acknowledgement of its own place within the (fading) firmament of Roland Emmerich disaster epics and a desire to update his outmoded style to fit the times. Riddled with as many cliches as CGI shots, Emmerich tries very hard and unfortunately succeeds in proving the irrelevance of the genre he practically created.