Moonfall Shoots for the Stars, and Probably Lands Among the Cult Classics

Let's get something important out of the way. Moonfall, Roland Emmerich's latest disaster production, is a bad movie. Mystery Science Theater bad. It's paced poorly, cut worse, the acting often seems phoned in at best, and the plot is the worst mish-mash of Independence Day and 2012 that I can imagine. There have been many better 'thing smashes into the world' movies, the most recent of which being Greenland (2019), which at the time I definitely thought had been directed by Emmerich. All of that said, I still genuinely enjoyed the absolutely off the rails second half, and left the movie wanting to write about it. So let's dig into it. Full spoilers for the best worst disaster movie of the year. 

Moonfall starts with a fairly confusing disaster in space that's been far better done in films like Gravity. The scene serves solely to introduce our two main characters (Astronauts Harper and Fowler), and its main sin is that it makes even less sense as you learn about what actually happened later in the course of the movie. There's a neat bit of parallelism that pays off later in the film, but that's about it. There's then a weird cut to a newscast about something that definitely would have been much cooler to actually see in the film, then a bad scene involving the astronaut's kid, and then an abrupt '10 years later' transition that probably should have come after the original scene. It's all very Transformers, and it sucks. 

As we were introduced to the crackpot scientist over the next few minutes, I wondered exactly what message the movie was trying to convey. While not exactly some sort of satirical mastermind or deeply thoughtful genius, Emmerich has dabbled with takes on climate change, war, patriotism, and even tried to address the gay rights movement in Stonewall, a movie which I've never seen but was apparently widely derided. At moments this movie could be read as being a warning against climate change denialism, or maybe AI alarmism. But its most politically relevant character, Dr. Houseman (not an actual doctor, of any kind), is just a truly unhinged conspiracy theorist who spends most of the movie talking about alien megastructures and quipping about Elon Musk - a billionaire who Emmerich is clearly a fan of. In 2022, as conspiracy theorists prolong a deadly pandemic and Musk himself spends his days setting fire to his own company's stock on Twitter, I'm not sure this was the hero we needed, or even the one we deserved. 

I feel like, even though this movie runs for 2 hours and 10 minutes, most of it was left on the cutting room floor. Our characters are reintroduced without much characterization. Harper, played with apparent confusion and a furrowed brow by Patrick Wilson, is a disgraced former astronaut who can't make rent and spends his time giving talks to middle schoolers. Fowler, played mostly competently by Halle Berry, is some kind of NASA executive close to the Director. Both characters have family troubles - Harper's son Sonny is arrested in a high speed chase by LAPD, while Fowler is apparently disappointed that her ex-husband doesn't have much to do with her own son's life. It's all very rote, and the dramatic tension is nothing I haven't seen in a million better movies, including some by Roland Emmerich. 

Very quickly we learn that both NASA and Houseman have discovered that the moon is on a collision course with Earth (nobody let the astrophysicists watch this movie, they'll be insufferable for the next few months at least). NASA decides to hide their discovery and do nothing, for some reason, a decision Houseman completely negates by releasing all of his findings in a viral online media campaign. NASA sends a mission with 3 astronauts to the moon, all of whom are soon brutally murdered by some sort of weird smoky apparition in space that's apparently designed to seek out organic matter among technology. Fowler becomes the NASA director and learns that NASA has known about the moon being an alien structure since the 60s and done nothing about it, for some reason? Public order breaks down, everyone is fleeing to Colorado, the military is going to nuke the moon (duh), and Fowler discovers some sort of secret EMP program NASA was working on decades prior. 

I'm going to be honest, at this point I felt like checking out of the movie. All of the above felt as though it was rushed and poorly explained, and the hollow moon theory should have stayed with HG Wells in 1901. The only real destruction had been wrought in one tsunami (sorry, gravity wave) scene set in Los Angeles which I won't even do the disservice of comparing to the New York storm surge in The Day After Tomorrow. I hadn't expected a work of art, but I was thoroughly disappointed to have not even discovered a decent Emmerich movie. 

Then the second half starts. Fowler rescues Harper and the space shuttle Endeavor and advances a plan in which they'll fly the ship without electronics into the moon, bait out the violent entity that lives inside (and turns out to be some sort of horde of nanotechnology which is damaging the moon and causing it to deorbit), and kill it with the EMP. We get my favorite scene in the movie, where the Endeavor is located with graffiti scrawled all over it including a huge "Screw the Moon", and is quickly extricated through the streets of LA. The Endeavor is restored and launches barely in time to escape another massive gravity wave. The astronaut's kids flee in a Humvee bound for Pikes Peak. And we get lots of visually interesting shots of a massive moon 'rising' over the Earth and causing unimaginable destruction. The music cues rise, the action gets more interesting, and Harper, Fowler, and Houseman all go to space. 

The next hour of the movie goes absolutely nuts. The astronauts' initial foolproof plan fails, forcing them to go inside the moon and make first contact with the operating system inside of the moon. We're bombarded with a completely insane exposition dump about a progenitor race of humans which achieved singularity and was immediately destroyed by the AI it created. Meanwhile, Earth is ravaged by the ever closer moon in more and more spectacular ways. The astronauts' kids and their families survive more and more insane disasters. As a firefighter the complete abuse of the concept of SCBA did bother me, but like the astrophysicists I'm just going to have to learn to live in fantasy and relax. 

Houseman sacrifices himself to kill the bad AI and somehow becomes part of the good AI, Harper and Fowler return to Earth in a truly absurd scene in which they just pop out of the Moon and are immediately only a few thousand feet from the Earth's crust and happen to land in more or less exactly the same spot where their children ended up. Everyone unites happily, except the ex husband and the ex wife's new husband, both of whom were killed off screen (Emmerich should really go see a couples therapist). The Moon returns to its normal orbit, leaving Earth an utterly destroyed mess that surely no civilization could ever survive. And I allowed myself to come off the literal edge of my seat. 

I genuinely cannot tell you why I felt so low on the first half of this garbage movie and so high on the second half of this insane thriller. Maybe it was the fact that Emmerich just threw a second even more absurd sci-fi premise on top of his already absurd sci-fi premise. Maybe it was that the actors finally managed to look like they were enjoying themselves and feeling the script. Maybe it was just that the classic Emmerich model of wholesale destruction of cities finally caught up to the writing, and my inner 9 year old reveled in it. Regardless of the answer, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, I actually recommend that anyone with a couple hours and ten bucks to spend goes and enjoys this popcorn flick however they can safely do so. You'll probably regret it, but in a good way.