Moonfall (2022)

★★★
I read somewhere that after 2012, Roland Emmerich would be finished with disaster movies. Indeed, how could he top that? He returned anyway with Independence Day: Resurgence, not only breaking that pledge but also delivering his weakest movie by far. It was not his finest hour, that’s for sure. Was he out of ideas? After every kind of disaster imaginable, what else was left for him to toss at us? An asteroid? Michael Bay hit us over the head with that one. This kind of movie is his calling card, and I suppose we’re better off with him at the helm. After trying something different, like the solid Midway, Emmerich is back, unable to stay away from the genre he knows best. One thing he hasn’t tried yet was crashing the moon into the earth, an event humans couldn’t possibly survive. Therein lies the challenge. How exactly is he going to show us such a gargantuan spectacle while sparing humanity from extinction? Leave it to Emmerich to find a way.

As the story opens, three astronauts are repairing a satellite when a swarm of unknown composition attacks the shuttle. Only Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson, looking shockingly like Thomas Jane) and Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) survive. After the incident, Harper is blamed for the disaster and falls into disgrace. Ten years later, amateur astronomer K.C. Houseman (John Bradley) discovers that the moon’s orbital radius is decreasing, meaning that it’s getting closer to the earth. He tries to inform Brian, now a guide at an observatory, but is dismissed as crazy. K.C. releases his evidence online and soon enough the news is trending all over the world. NASA gets wind of it, and Jo, now the Deputy Director, learns that the agency has known that the moon was hollow ever since the moon landing in 1969. She eventually learns that Brian was right. It was not human error but an attack by something originating inside the moon. The two team up—reluctantly as Brian feels Jo betrayed him—to come up with a plan to stop it.

Like all movies of this sort, whether made by Emmerich or not, there is the family in crisis. We saw it recently in Greenland and San Andrea. Brian is estranged from his family, and his delinquent son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) is always in trouble with the law. Jo’s son Jimmy (Zayn Maloney) and nanny Michelle (Kelly Yu) need to get to a shelter in Colorado where Jimmy’s father awaits. Sonny, Jimmy and Michelle make the difficult trek to Colorado amidst a landscape made treacherous by flooding, earthquakes and gravitational variances.

I was satisfied with the reasoning behind the moon’s sudden shift in orbit and the solution to stabilize it. It’s imaginative, though the more head-scratching aspects of the threat in conjunction with what’s inside the hollow moon are overlooked. Still, Moonfall moves at a fast pace. It has that sense of urgency that is common in an Emmerich disaster film. The special effects don’t disappoint. As always, a visual of New York City’s destruction is on display. At this point, it would be a betrayal if Emmerich didn’t destroy it. Visuals of the moon’s proximity to the earth are spectacular, and the chaos at ground level is convincing in every way. The action moves frantically, and in this regard Emmerich hasn’t lost his touch. That ID4 sequel should be dismissed as an anomaly.

Moonfall does what an Emmerich movie does when it’s done right. It’s a good distraction with terrific special effects and enough of a human element to add suspense to the characters’ stories. We get just enough, no more and no less. I know there is a segment of viewers that gets tired of seeing essentially the same movie and would challenge the filmmakers to create something different. I would welcome the same thing. The thrill of seeing something new is exhilarating. 2016’s Passengers, while not presenting a threat to civilization, was a good example of creating an overwhelmingly worrisome scenario and writing characters who grow to face it. If a particular movie isn’t going to do that, then at least be competent. Moonfall is competent.

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