Moonfall

Moonfall
Starring Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry, John Bradley, Michael Pena
Directed by Roland Emmerich

Some directors are known for the style of movies they create. Martin Scorsese is the Godfather of mobster films. Wes Craven haunted your nightmares with his iconic horror masterpieces. Michael Bay trades in intelligent storylines for explosions. And Roland Emmerich is known for destroying the world on multiple occasions. "Independence Day," "The Day After Tomorrow," and "2012" show his petulance for destroying the world in varying different ways, from aliens to global warming to Mayan prophecies, and now he's introducing a whole new way to wreak havoc on our beloved blue marble - with sentient alien AI that lives in the moon and changes its orbit so it hurdles toward Earth...or something like that.

Ten years after a close encounter with a strange alien life form in space, former astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) is now divorced, his son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) is estranged from him, and he was dishonorably fired from NASA for speaking the truth. His fellow NASA astronaut, Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry), was also in space when Brian had his encounter, but was knocked out during the time and didn't see anything. She remained with NASA and rose among the ranks, becoming the Deputy Director. Unbeknownst to either of them, the moon starts changing its orbit and makes a slow descent to Earth, and only crackpot conspiracy theorist KC Houseman (John Bradley) notices this. He leaks the news to the media, and Jocinda realizes that the moon is in fact heading toward Earth. After finding out a way to stop the moon from crashing to Earth, she enlists Brian's help (along with KC, who attached himself to Brian because he was the only one who believed him) to go to the moon and stop whatever is causing the impending collision course from happening.

"Moonfall" could very well spell the downfall of Emmerich's end-of-the-world films, as it's easily his worst, most pointless, and utterly dumbfounded nonsensical film to date (this makes "Independence Day: Resurgence" seem Oscar-worthy in comparison) - a film that, in every aspect, shouldn't even exist. There's no real depth to it, but instead it compiles a bunch of different stories together to try to string a cohesive storyline, but failing on every level. On one end it's a generic, bland, end-of-the-world story, but then it also tries to be a highly philosophical, mind-bending epic - and somehow manages to fail on both ends. It seems that no one, not even Emmerich, wanted to even do this project, and I wonder who was holding the proverbial gun to their heads as it seems no one had any desire to produce something of value, or even the coveted "so bad it's good" feel.

Even in trying to summarize the movie, it didn't make a lot of sense, and seeing it on the big screen makes even less sense. It would've been simpler to just say that the moon fell out of orbit on its own rather than some intricate alien plot that also doesn't make sense, so I guess it's a no-win situation on that end. Still, you'd expect the end-of-the-world to be a little...exciting? Yet here it seems like an everyday occurrence, as there's more fighting between family members than preventing humanity's extinction. Even Emmerich's money shots of major landmarks getting destroyed is lost here, as the destruction is almost at a bare minimum, with only a few cities getting wrecked as you see a huge obviously-CGI moon in the background (I won't even get into the real science if this were to happen, as we would all probably be dead before we'd even notice). The budget for the film had to be low, as there's so many obvious CGI shots that you'd understandably think this was a SyFy Original film and not a supposed big-budget blockbuster. As meteors strike the planet, the characters react almost with a shrug, before seemingly realizing that it was supposed to happen, then overact the heck out of it. It's obvious that they were shooting on a sound stage as several moments seem to happen in the same spot at different times. It's incredibly lazy work especially for someone who made the White House getting blown up by aliens look so real back in 1996.

The story, as I said earlier, fluctuates from hare-brained to wannabe philosophical, but the delivery is even more lazily done. Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry act like they're in some humdrum romantic comedy, where discussions about the demise of the planet is given as much weight as what to eat for dinner. Only John Bradley is given enough crazy dialogue to make his character more three-dimensional, and even then he just comes across as a stock conspiracy theorist character who's as surprised as anyone to realize that he was right all along. Throw in some pointless family drama featuring Charlie Plummer seemingly stoned out of mind in real life to even comprehend what movie he was in, to Michael Pena's generic stepfather role and Donald Sutherland randomly appearing out of the shadows (literally) to give one expositional line of dialogue before disappearing back into the shadows (literally), and the whole film feels like an exhaustive exercise in what seems to be some Illuminati-level threat to Emmerich's life to give at least one disaster flick every few years.

In trying to give a more unique story to the end of the world, Roland Emmerich instead gives us "Moonfall," a film so convoluted and nonsensical that it's not even "so good it's bad," but just simply bad - and not even a group of A-list celebrities could save it from crashing to the earth with a resounding "dud."

The Score: C-