Roland Emmerich dips his toe back into the doomsday movie genre once again with Moonfall. This time the biggest disaster is the movie itself.
Emmerich has a track record of successful disaster movies with Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and 2012 (2009) but somewhere along the way, he lost it. There isn’t a moment in the viewing of Moonfall where questions about the story, characters, and overall direction of the film aren’t at the forefront of the viewer’s mind. The illogical actions of the characters are laughable while their jokes fall flat. None of the more sombre notes of the film landed any real emotional resonance; they almost always were greeted with a chuckle instead of a tear.
The filmmakers didn’t seem to try hard enough to nail down the film’s tone. Sometimes there are moments of all-out comedy. Sometimes it’s sci-fi to the level of Star Wars. Other times, audiences are greeted with reams of scientific jargon that anyone with a tenth-grade education will know is inaccurate. The breakneck pacing of Moonfall feels like the filmmakers wanted to make a ten-hour TV show but couldn’t, so they crammed all that content into the film’s two-hour runtime. The result is a constant feeling of being out of breath, catching up to the film, and not receiving any emotional clarity or payoff in any way.
If there is any saving grace, it would be the performances of John Bradley and Halle Berry. While their hands are not fully clean of the stink of this film, they do have moments that show their inherent quality as actors. John Bradley’s portrayal of a conspiracy theorist that the world sees as worthless rings true, and Halle Berry’s turnout as Jo Fowler, the newly appointed head of NASA, shows a powerful female presence. All other performances were phoned in, and that’s putting it nicely. Even the legendary Donald Sutherland’s cameo as the mysterious Holdenfield seemed odd and out of place.
Overall, Moonfall is a film that needed another year in script development. A simplified version of the film could have turned out to be a classic sci-fi romp or a hardcore science drama in the vein of The Martian (2015) or Interstellar (2014). Yet, the filmmakers’ inability to decide on the film’s tone ultimately left it feeling like the wish.com version of the film it could have been.
Fun Fact:
Josh Gad was originally cast as John Bradley’s character, KC Houseman, but dropped out of the film due to scheduling conflicts.
COMMENTS