When the Moon hits your eye...
There is dumb, and then there is Roland Emmerich dumb. To wit:
-Dumb: "William Shakespeare's" plays were written by a nobleman, possibly Edward De Vere. Roland Emmerich Dumb: Also King James I was a gay dwarf.
-Dumb: The Mayans predicted the end of the world in the year 2012. Roland Emmerich Dumb: This will happen because the sun begins spewing mutated neutrinos at the Earth.
-Dumb: Godzilla is American now. Roland Emmerich Dumb: Godzilla is a fucking big iguana now.
Moonfall, the director-writer's newest trip back to the disaster movie genre, the form upon which his entire reputation rests (you can take that however you like), adds a real barnburner of an example, and I will be sort of giving away something that happens a bit into the 130-minute film's running time. But it was already given away in the ad campaign, and if I am being honest, the difference between "Moonfall, the hokey-looking picture that I was probably going to see sometime during its theatrical run" and "Moonfall, for which I bought opening weekend IMAX tickets within minutes of them going on sale" was knowing this thing about it, so it stands, Therefore, I give you - Dumb: The Moon is going to crash into the Earth... Roland Emmerich Dumb: ...because it's a huge alien machine that was broken by a swarm of evil space-nanites.
Somehow, that was enough to give me the very real hope that Moonfall was going to be a so-dumb-it's-a-secret-masterpiece achievement on par with 2012, which is to my mind Emmerich's most purely enjoyable disaster movie by far, and honestly also one of the closest any of his film's come to being "good", in its melodramatic all-star-cast-screaming-hammily excess, and the sheer quantity of stuff it shoves into its bloated running time. Moonfall has just as much stuff and it's shorter on top of it, though it lacks a certain je ne sai quoi that 2012 keeps demonstrating over and over again, a sparkling whimsy to its unbelievably asinine narrative developments. So I suppose I would plot out this new film somewhere in the middle of Emmerich's filmography, less bubbly fun than 2012 but certainly better than the morose, preachy, and visually bland The Day After Tomorrow. And it manages to one-up the single part of the latter film that I most enjoy: while The Day After Tomorrow posits that it is possible to outrun "the cold", Moonfall has two different sequences that appear to seriously suggest that it is possible to outrun gravity.
All these comparisons aside, the film that this actually suggests to me the most is not an Emmerich film at all, but the forgotten 2003 disaster movie The Core. The two film have a shared foundation: not merely in bad science, which is just part of what makes this genre what it is, but in the wall-to-wall scientific illiteracy, present in every scene and baked into the concept so early on that if you pulled it all out, all you'd have left would be a scene of Patrick Wilson hiding from his landlord. Wilson plays a disgraced NASA astronaut, Brian Harper, who we meet in the opening scene that rips off Gravity so hard that you'd have to be Roland Emmerich not to feel ashamed of having perpetrated it. There's an accident that results in the death of another astronaut, and Brian is sure that it was caused by a swam of evil space-nanites, but when he reports this back on Earth, he's accused of making the whole thing up to deflect blame from his own failings. So now he's a broken-down drunk, alienated from his son Sonny (Charlie Harper) - Sonny! That's not even a "put a placeholder into the screenplay and we'll change it in the next draft" name, that's a "...and we'll change it by the time we finish this scene" name - and divorced from his onetime-understanding wife Brenda (Carolina Bartczak), presently married to an enormously successful Lexus dealer named Tom Lopez (Michael Peña), and I would love to know what Lexus thought they were getting out of this deal. Brian's former spaceflight buddy, Jocinda "Jo" Fowler (Halle Berry) is still at NASA, and she still feels sorry that she was unable to corroborate his story, which is going to make her an excellent ally when the roly poly British weirdo KC Houseman (John Bradley) attacks Brian with proof that the Moon has shifted from its orbit. And that, by the way, is where I first started getting The Core vibes: that movie's signature moment was, of course, Stanley Tucci gravely declaring that "the core of the Earth... has stopped spinning", and we only get that once. I wasn't counting, but I swear, we hear somebody say "the Moon... has shifted from its orbit" at least six different times in Moonfall.
The film breaks away from the usual Emmerich narrative structure: the film almost immediately sets up this dreadful crisis, with NASA's scientist quickly figuring out that the tightening, spiralling orbit means that the Moon will be in "burst into fragments and murder us all with an unending meteorite storm" phase (just about the only piece of honest-to-God good science in the movie, incidentally) in about three weeks. So the frantic pace is instead about finding a way to stop it, which, since KC's belief that the Moon is an artificial "megastructure" proves to be entirely correct, means that he and Jo and Brian are at some point going to need to make a manned flight up there to kick the engines and see about them damn space-nanites, and find out that Emmerich had in mind at least one sequel and possibly an entire extended cinematic universe, the sweet silly boy.
Here is what I am certain of: Moonfall is bad. Here is what else I am certain of: I had a great time watching it. Everything else gets a bit hazy, though it's certainly not as much campy fun as 2012, which had all of those actually great actors whooping and making fools of themselves. Here, we only get Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry, both of whom are comfortably in the "Roland Emmerich disaster picture" phase of their careers (and indeed, has Wilson ever been anywhere else?"), and seem miserably resigned to that fact: they're snapping off the dialogue with irritable indifference and the exact minimum amount of professionalism required so that you could never honestly accuse either of them are giving a "bad" performance. Donald Sutherland shows up for one scene to moodily deliver exposition in chiaroscuro lighting, and that's fun, but it is extremely clear from how long it is and how it has been staged that the budget included a line for precisely one (and only one!) day's worth of Donald Sutherland. Peña, who should absolutely have aced the role of "unctuous new husband in a melodramatic disaster movie", isn't more than fine, and the movie obviously doesn't quite know why it got such a high-profile actor for such a limp noodle of a role. Which only leaves us with Bradley to speak of, playing a role written for Josh Gad like it was a role written for Nick Frost. He is, at a minimum, very enthusiastic to take on the thankless role of chubby comic relief conspiracy nut, and he does give some life to the proceedings.
Still, the human element is pretty scrawny in Moonfall, and I think that is what makes all the difference why this lacks the charm of 2012.. Because at the level of idiotically conceived disaster setpieces rendered with lovingly overpriced effects, this is absolutely the match to anything Emmerich has ever made. Many of the setpieces, in fact, with their gravitational warping caused by the Moon hovering not more than several miles above the characters' heads, look very much like the setpieces in the unwatchable Independence Day: Resurgence, enough so that part of me honestly wonders if this movie is Emmerich's attempt to apologise for how shitty that one was.
If so, mission accomplished. Moonfall is surprisingly good at the level of pure lizard-brain spectacle: in particular, it has shockingly excellent CGI, far better than it needs, better than any film of the last couple of years other than Dune. And it applies that CGI to some impressively gaudy scenes of things being destroyed, gaudiness that is often compounded by the film's flagrant disregard for real physics when extremely flashy anti-physics are available (hence things like outrunning gravity).
But good CGI disasters aren't so very hard to come by; the real charm of Moonfall likes in how bluntly idiotic it is. Not campy, not cheekily ironic, not leaning into itself: just plain low-down blithering nonsense. When matched to the extreme bombast of Emmerich's directing, I find it kind of excitingly zesty. And you can play a lot of fun games with yourself as you watch: look for all of the times that the film is openly pandering to its Chinese co-producers (including one entire character, an exchange student played by Kelly Yu, who serves no imaginable purpose in the film otherwise), count how often they say "megastructure", do a shot every time a diagram of the Moon's aberrant orbit is shown, make a list of all the previously existing sci-fi properties that the film directly steals from once it arrives on the inside of the dying robot Moon.
It's all pretty oppressively meatheaded, though, and the lack of campiness could probably be deadly for the wrong viewer; I think that thinking of it as "The Core and 2012 had a baby" gets you most of the way towards making an informed decision. Me, I had a hoot; possibly just that I'm starved for a popcorn movie with a real personality, however gnarled and crabbed and terrible. But it's pure, unadulterated Emmerich, at any rate, and in the 2020s, pure, unadulterated anything is worth at least a little love, in my opinion.
-Dumb: "William Shakespeare's" plays were written by a nobleman, possibly Edward De Vere. Roland Emmerich Dumb: Also King James I was a gay dwarf.
-Dumb: The Mayans predicted the end of the world in the year 2012. Roland Emmerich Dumb: This will happen because the sun begins spewing mutated neutrinos at the Earth.
-Dumb: Godzilla is American now. Roland Emmerich Dumb: Godzilla is a fucking big iguana now.
Moonfall, the director-writer's newest trip back to the disaster movie genre, the form upon which his entire reputation rests (you can take that however you like), adds a real barnburner of an example, and I will be sort of giving away something that happens a bit into the 130-minute film's running time. But it was already given away in the ad campaign, and if I am being honest, the difference between "Moonfall, the hokey-looking picture that I was probably going to see sometime during its theatrical run" and "Moonfall, for which I bought opening weekend IMAX tickets within minutes of them going on sale" was knowing this thing about it, so it stands, Therefore, I give you - Dumb: The Moon is going to crash into the Earth... Roland Emmerich Dumb: ...because it's a huge alien machine that was broken by a swarm of evil space-nanites.
Somehow, that was enough to give me the very real hope that Moonfall was going to be a so-dumb-it's-a-secret-masterpiece achievement on par with 2012, which is to my mind Emmerich's most purely enjoyable disaster movie by far, and honestly also one of the closest any of his film's come to being "good", in its melodramatic all-star-cast-screaming-hammily excess, and the sheer quantity of stuff it shoves into its bloated running time. Moonfall has just as much stuff and it's shorter on top of it, though it lacks a certain je ne sai quoi that 2012 keeps demonstrating over and over again, a sparkling whimsy to its unbelievably asinine narrative developments. So I suppose I would plot out this new film somewhere in the middle of Emmerich's filmography, less bubbly fun than 2012 but certainly better than the morose, preachy, and visually bland The Day After Tomorrow. And it manages to one-up the single part of the latter film that I most enjoy: while The Day After Tomorrow posits that it is possible to outrun "the cold", Moonfall has two different sequences that appear to seriously suggest that it is possible to outrun gravity.
All these comparisons aside, the film that this actually suggests to me the most is not an Emmerich film at all, but the forgotten 2003 disaster movie The Core. The two film have a shared foundation: not merely in bad science, which is just part of what makes this genre what it is, but in the wall-to-wall scientific illiteracy, present in every scene and baked into the concept so early on that if you pulled it all out, all you'd have left would be a scene of Patrick Wilson hiding from his landlord. Wilson plays a disgraced NASA astronaut, Brian Harper, who we meet in the opening scene that rips off Gravity so hard that you'd have to be Roland Emmerich not to feel ashamed of having perpetrated it. There's an accident that results in the death of another astronaut, and Brian is sure that it was caused by a swam of evil space-nanites, but when he reports this back on Earth, he's accused of making the whole thing up to deflect blame from his own failings. So now he's a broken-down drunk, alienated from his son Sonny (Charlie Harper) - Sonny! That's not even a "put a placeholder into the screenplay and we'll change it in the next draft" name, that's a "...and we'll change it by the time we finish this scene" name - and divorced from his onetime-understanding wife Brenda (Carolina Bartczak), presently married to an enormously successful Lexus dealer named Tom Lopez (Michael Peña), and I would love to know what Lexus thought they were getting out of this deal. Brian's former spaceflight buddy, Jocinda "Jo" Fowler (Halle Berry) is still at NASA, and she still feels sorry that she was unable to corroborate his story, which is going to make her an excellent ally when the roly poly British weirdo KC Houseman (John Bradley) attacks Brian with proof that the Moon has shifted from its orbit. And that, by the way, is where I first started getting The Core vibes: that movie's signature moment was, of course, Stanley Tucci gravely declaring that "the core of the Earth... has stopped spinning", and we only get that once. I wasn't counting, but I swear, we hear somebody say "the Moon... has shifted from its orbit" at least six different times in Moonfall.
The film breaks away from the usual Emmerich narrative structure: the film almost immediately sets up this dreadful crisis, with NASA's scientist quickly figuring out that the tightening, spiralling orbit means that the Moon will be in "burst into fragments and murder us all with an unending meteorite storm" phase (just about the only piece of honest-to-God good science in the movie, incidentally) in about three weeks. So the frantic pace is instead about finding a way to stop it, which, since KC's belief that the Moon is an artificial "megastructure" proves to be entirely correct, means that he and Jo and Brian are at some point going to need to make a manned flight up there to kick the engines and see about them damn space-nanites, and find out that Emmerich had in mind at least one sequel and possibly an entire extended cinematic universe, the sweet silly boy.
Here is what I am certain of: Moonfall is bad. Here is what else I am certain of: I had a great time watching it. Everything else gets a bit hazy, though it's certainly not as much campy fun as 2012, which had all of those actually great actors whooping and making fools of themselves. Here, we only get Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry, both of whom are comfortably in the "Roland Emmerich disaster picture" phase of their careers (and indeed, has Wilson ever been anywhere else?"), and seem miserably resigned to that fact: they're snapping off the dialogue with irritable indifference and the exact minimum amount of professionalism required so that you could never honestly accuse either of them are giving a "bad" performance. Donald Sutherland shows up for one scene to moodily deliver exposition in chiaroscuro lighting, and that's fun, but it is extremely clear from how long it is and how it has been staged that the budget included a line for precisely one (and only one!) day's worth of Donald Sutherland. Peña, who should absolutely have aced the role of "unctuous new husband in a melodramatic disaster movie", isn't more than fine, and the movie obviously doesn't quite know why it got such a high-profile actor for such a limp noodle of a role. Which only leaves us with Bradley to speak of, playing a role written for Josh Gad like it was a role written for Nick Frost. He is, at a minimum, very enthusiastic to take on the thankless role of chubby comic relief conspiracy nut, and he does give some life to the proceedings.
Still, the human element is pretty scrawny in Moonfall, and I think that is what makes all the difference why this lacks the charm of 2012.. Because at the level of idiotically conceived disaster setpieces rendered with lovingly overpriced effects, this is absolutely the match to anything Emmerich has ever made. Many of the setpieces, in fact, with their gravitational warping caused by the Moon hovering not more than several miles above the characters' heads, look very much like the setpieces in the unwatchable Independence Day: Resurgence, enough so that part of me honestly wonders if this movie is Emmerich's attempt to apologise for how shitty that one was.
If so, mission accomplished. Moonfall is surprisingly good at the level of pure lizard-brain spectacle: in particular, it has shockingly excellent CGI, far better than it needs, better than any film of the last couple of years other than Dune. And it applies that CGI to some impressively gaudy scenes of things being destroyed, gaudiness that is often compounded by the film's flagrant disregard for real physics when extremely flashy anti-physics are available (hence things like outrunning gravity).
But good CGI disasters aren't so very hard to come by; the real charm of Moonfall likes in how bluntly idiotic it is. Not campy, not cheekily ironic, not leaning into itself: just plain low-down blithering nonsense. When matched to the extreme bombast of Emmerich's directing, I find it kind of excitingly zesty. And you can play a lot of fun games with yourself as you watch: look for all of the times that the film is openly pandering to its Chinese co-producers (including one entire character, an exchange student played by Kelly Yu, who serves no imaginable purpose in the film otherwise), count how often they say "megastructure", do a shot every time a diagram of the Moon's aberrant orbit is shown, make a list of all the previously existing sci-fi properties that the film directly steals from once it arrives on the inside of the dying robot Moon.
It's all pretty oppressively meatheaded, though, and the lack of campiness could probably be deadly for the wrong viewer; I think that thinking of it as "The Core and 2012 had a baby" gets you most of the way towards making an informed decision. Me, I had a hoot; possibly just that I'm starved for a popcorn movie with a real personality, however gnarled and crabbed and terrible. But it's pure, unadulterated Emmerich, at any rate, and in the 2020s, pure, unadulterated anything is worth at least a little love, in my opinion.
