by Jeffery J. Rahming, Contributing Writer
In what was a somewhat slow year for movies, one of the most amusing theater-going experiences that I had in 2021 was the collective groan that rose from an entire audience when the trailer for Moonfall finished. It’s one of those movies where the premise alone seems asinine. But personally, the trailer left me somewhat curious. Known primarily for his disaster movies such as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, director Roland Emmerich has established a consistent career in delivering big budget visual feasts that, while often not the best in quality, tend to at least be entertaining. At his point, it’s not uncommon for Emmerich to make a bad movie, but Moonfall is one thing that most of his other movies aren’t: unbelievingly and insultingly boring.
In Moonfall, we follow Astronauts Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry), and conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (John Bradley). They discover that the moon’s orbit has changed and is getting closer to the earth. With almost no support from the panicking governments of the world, the trio takes off on an adventure to save the world from destruction. Unfortunately, what’s an adventure for them is a chore for the audience.
Moonfall feels like Emmerich was challenged to make a movie about the moon crashing into the earth as dull as possible. There’s very little imagination to be found in any of these multi-million dollar set pieces. Entire cities fly into the sky, giant moon rocks crash into the planet, and huge tidal waves rise to impossible altitudes, and somehow none of this manages to be even the slightest bit engaging. At their best, disaster movies capture the helplessness and terror that comes with the chaos of a world-ending event. Despite the film’s title, the world’s response to the moon suddenly careening into the earth is basically an afterthought in this movie. The majority of the plot is spent with our main characters traveling to the moon in a spaceship. They’re far away from the destruction on the ground and spend most of the runtime spouting off monologues of boring technobabble. With our main characters so far removed from the destruction, the multiple scenes of devastation have absolutely no stakes to them. You may as well just be watching a VFX tech demo. In films like 2012 or Independence Day, there was a wide cast of protagonists to follow so we really got to feel the wider impact of these events and how different characters reacted to the scenario. But in Moonfall, the utter lack of humans in any of the major disaster scenes leaves them feeling empty and meaningless.
Even in the couple of scenes when the disaster directly endangers our characters, none of them are interesting enough to care about anyway. Great actors play the main trio we follow in this movie, but unfortunately, their talents can’t overcome how underwritten their characters are. You never get a sense of who these people are outside of their jobs as astronauts. The three leads all have subplots involving their families in a half-hearted attempt to give them some depth, but the relationships are so poorly written and portrayed that you could cut these side characters out of the movie, and hardly anything would be significantly different. For example, one of the film’s subplots deals with Wilson’s strained relationship with his son (Charlie Plummer), but they hardly have any scenes together, and even when they do, they fall flat due to Plummer delivering all his lines like he’s reading them off a teleprompter for the first time.
Moonfall fails at just about every important part of a big blockbuster movie. The scenes of destruction feel uninspired, the characters are two-dimensional, and you’re left wondering how a movie that costs as much as this one could lack any exciting moments. Even if you’re a fan of disaster movies, Moonfall isn’t worth the two hours that could be spent watching something far more entertaining.
Grade: D+
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