Review: Moonfall

On a satellite repair mission, NASA astronaut Patrick Wilson encounters something he believes to be extra-terrestrial, colliding with the spaceship it results in a fellow astronaut being killed. Back home in an official inquiry, Wilson’s account of events is not backed up by mission leader Halle Berry, and the findings blame technical issues and Wilson basically made the scapegoat. A few years later the disgraced astronaut is now near-homeless and leading children’s tours at a museum whilst Berry is now NASA deputy director. One day, Wilson encounters budding scientist and conspiracy theorist John Bradley who believes the moon is really an extra-terrestrial satellite and that its orbit has changed. Soon NASA seems to concur, believing the moon is on a collision course with Earth. Berry and her NASA colleagues need drunk and miserable Wilson to get his shit together to help in their possible solution to the problem. Michael Pena plays the new man in Wilson’s ex’s life, Charlie Plummer is Wilson’s estranged son, Eme Ikwuakor is an Air Force General and Berry’s ex, and Donald Sutherland turns up as a wheelchair-bound former NASA official.

 

Critically mauled and a massive box-office flop, this 2022 sci-fi/disaster movie from director Roland Emmerich (“Universal Soldier”, “Stargate”, “ID4”, “The Day After Tomorrow”) is so embarrassing that had more people seen it, Emmerich’s career would be over. As is, I think he might just survive it but I must say this is by far his worst film to date. Yes, even worse than his maligned and frankly boring “Godzilla”.

 

I knew I was in for a turd when we opened with Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry on a mission while disputing the lyrics to Toto’s “Africa”. This is your opening scene? Really? Of the two, Wilson is surprisingly not bad and quite well-cast as a disgraced hero looking for redemption. It’s a decent fit for his modest talents. However, the rather overrated Berry is astonishingly amateurish here. I thought that way about her overwrought Oscar-winning turn in “Monster’s Ball” too, among other turns but I’ve seen her do OK work elsewhere (“Things We Lost in the Fire”, “The Call”) and here she’s really, really bad. Either she’s phoning it in – badly – or she’s just flagrantly miscast and unconvincing. Either way, she’s a constant and unwelcome distraction barely mustering up the effort to deliver her admittedly awful dialogue. On the other hand, John Bradley has no issues convincing as the token conspiracy nut/token nerdy amateur scientist (and professional janitor). He’s fairly decent value for what the role is worth, and I feel bad that he has pitched his tent to the wrong blockbuster after being one of the brightest spots on “Game of Thrones”. To be fair, I think a percentage of the film’s poor reception at the box-office is attributed to audiences in the COVID-era being more reticent and discerning in their cinema-going. At the complete other end of the spectrum is a cameo-playing Donald Sutherland giving perhaps the worst performance of his very long career. Wheelchair-bound, he’s hammy as hell and quite sad, really. Almost as bad is an actor named Eme Ikwuakor as Berry’s ex. He seems under the misguided impression that he’s playing the film’s villain (and he’s definitely not meant to be), and scowls his way through a completely awful, wooden performance. Did no one notice in the dailies?

 

The film has massive problems with narrative and pacing. 20 minutes in and I was completely discombobulated. Yet, for a film that darts quickly from one set of characters to another, it has the effect of making the plot set-up unravel at a glacial pace. It’s only after an hour that the characters get ready to go into orbit. I understand in hindsight why we needed scenes with Wilson’s delinquent son and his new stepfather (a wasted Michael Pena seemingly trying not to be noticed here) in terms of how the film eventually plays out. However, when it’s all said and done, those characters aren’t nearly interesting enough to warrant the time wasted introducing them at the expense of moving the plot along quicker. You never get involved in the immediacy and tension of the central plot because you’re already bored out of your mind while Emmerich and his co-writers go all ADHD intercutting between characters. Character depth is nice, but this isn’t the kind of film that really requires it, nor does Emmerich’s film really give it to us anyway. We get time with the characters, but do we really get to know all of them? Not really, not to any great depth outside of Wilson’s character perhaps.

 

To be honest, when the plot does finally arrive…it’s not especially interesting anyway and certainly very, very far from intelligent. The disaster at hand could be anything really, it feels arbitrarily chosen. I also felt Emmerich and his co-writers weren’t buying into their own BS enough for the first couple of acts. In the first 45 minutes alone there’s at least 10 moments where someone comes up with something ‘crazy’. At what point do we just accept that crazy is the order of the day here? I can’t swallow the film’s BS if it keeps being so reticent and apologetic about it. Having said that, the film up and loses its mind at the 90 minute mark to the hopeful embarrassment of all concerned. So perhaps an apology was indeed in order after all. As for the disaster scenes and devastation – it’s all very been there, done that and the FX aren’t even particularly impressive.

 

Despite the best efforts of Patrick Wilson and John Bradley, this is pretty tedious disaster stuff and eventually shamefully absurd. It takes too long to focus on the central plot, and when it does focus…the plot frankly isn’t all that interesting anyway and certainly very stupid at times. Halle Berry’s low-wattage performance is as dull as the plot in this disaster of a disaster film. The screenplay is by Emmerich, Harald Kloser (Emmerich’s superior “The Day After Tomorrow” and his dull and silly “2012”), and Spenser Cohen (“Extinction”). Perhaps Emmerich needs to put the disaster movie to bed and go back to making films like “Universal Soldier” and “Stargate”.

 

Rating: D-