Halle Berry to star in the Roland Emmerich movie that sounds like Armageddon but with the moon
Aux Features Film
Halle Berry and Josh Gad might seem like an odd coupling better suited for the comedy section at Blockbuster circa 1998, but if you’re Roland Emmerich—the Master Of Disaster, please—that’s a one-way ticket to the land of movie magic. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Berry is the latest to sign on for Emmerich’s latest disasterpiece, Moonfall. The action flick, which has been in the works for several years, is basically like Armageddon (an actual movie from 1998!), but instead of an asteroid it’s the MOON. Yes, Earth’s pleasant and benign nightlight is going mother fucking rogue and it’s up to Halle Berry and… Josh Gad… to save all of humankind. Berry will play a former astronaut who now works as a NASA administrator, and whose last space mission may (read: most definitely) hold a clue to figuring out this whole Killer Moon situation. Gad will play the wacky science character who discovers that the moon has fallen out of orbit and warns everyone about it—because he’s the wacky loner science guy who has nothing better to do but look at the moon while everyone else has sex. Have you seen his glasses? This thing writes itself.
If Moonfall is indeed taking its cues from Michael Bay’s Armageddon, we have to assume that Berry and Gad are just the beginning of an increasingly eclectic and potentially unwieldy ensemble that absolutely should—but probably will not—include Jason Clarke, at least one beloved character actor who is criminally underused and appears in only two scenes (like a Shea Whigham or similar), and (spins wheel for lady role) Maura Tierney. Godspeed to Moonfall, which is targeting a 2021 release.
42 Comments
Sounds like a certain Zelda game.
Now I wish the Air Force had blown up the moon in the fifties so we could have been spared this.
Halle Berry, NASA Abortionist. Come on Roland- give it an edge.
“Star child? Fuck that, give me the nuclear launch codes” – Her character, hopefully.
This will be the blockbuster event of 1999!
Moonfall aka The Adventures of Catwoman and … Bear Claw
Armageddon my foot, this is a full-fledged rip-off of a far superior work of 90s entertainment:
Emmerich has made 0 good movies. I know his dumb movies made money last century, but why are people still funding that hack?
He fascinates me because he makes dumb movies for and about America without actually being from there. Sort of a bigger-budget Luc Besson.I always like to refer to The Patriot as “The American Revolution for dummies, by dummies”.
Yeah, why are people still letting the 15th highest grossing director of all time make movies.
“2112″do i NEED to continue?
I had no idea he directed a Rush album.
man, he’s done HALF of It All
Independence Day #1 and Stargate are both good movies. Not great, but good. Otherwise his filmography is pretty sad. He is good at directing massive explosions though.
I really hate his work, personally, so stand by my statement that in my opinion he has 0 good movies. But in fairness, he does have one (The Patriot from summer 2000) that reached a critical consensus that it was good. It wasn’t one of the ones you named. I have to admit I never saw Patriot, so I’ll give him the benefit of my doubt and amend my claim. He’s made 1 good movie ever. It’s been 20 years since his one and only good movie. As I said, he made a lot of money in the 1900s and since… not so much. Why are they giving him money in the 2000s?https://www.metacritic.com/person/roland-emmerich
Metacritic is not a good way to judge big budget action/explosion movies. The average critic is much older and more highbrow than the general population. For movies like his you need imdb or rotten tomatoes.
I forgot about the patriot. Its pretty good, a bit more serious than his other big budget movies. So he has 3 good movies. You can’t reasonably say that Stargate and Independence Day are bad, they are both fun and entertaining.Its not a good record overall, but its not the worst thats for sure. Plenty of worse directors like Renny Harlin and Uwe Boll.
I won’t defend the quality of Emmerich’s work, because the movies of his I do like I’ll still admit are bad. However, his movies tend to make a lot of money on foreign markets. For example, 2012 had a budget of 200M. Its domestic take was only 166M, but internationally it made 625M. Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 B.C. had similar trends.
Midway was surprisingly decent. Also, the White House film was pretty good. Of all his disaster movies, my personal favorite is 2012 because of the sheer ridiculousness of every single scene in it.
Teenage me wants to punch you so hard right now.
I like cerebral movies, sure. But sometimes I want to watch something blow up in a big spectacle and he’s pretty adept at making it work with a plot that’s… passable.
Or.. here’s a crazy idea. Just make a film of Seveneves. The first sentence is “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.”Although, I’d really prefer Emmerich not do the first Neal Stephenson adaptation, so.. scratch that idea.
I’d second that idea, but it would be 17 hours long and the last 3 would be a totally different movie from the first 14.
I don’t believe that book could be made into fewer than five movies.
Ehh, it’d be better as a mini-series sure. But someone serious could get it down to 2 hours. Hell, Aniara covered 6 million years in less than that.
I would love to see a TV adaptation of the first two-thirds of Seveneves.
Still have the Snow Crash train wreck on HBO Max in the pipeline!
Little known fact? “Snow Crash Train Wreck” was the original title for Snowpiercer.
All this talk about Seveneves – which I have not read – is reminding me of my feelings about Fall Or Dodge In Hell (god, that title) which was basically “This is really neat, I like this…shit, now after about 1/3 of the way in it’s the most boring digital-afterlife shit I have ever encountered and it stays that way for the rest of the book.”Are all of Stephenson’s books like this?
He does have a tendency to do either a last chapter hard swerve (Seveneves, Anathem) where you have to back up a few pages to see if you missed something. Or there’s the ‘OK, I’m tired of writing this, here’s the end.. boop de poop‘. Cryptonomicon in particular is like that.I personally didn’t care for Reamde so I haven’t read the Dodge book yet.There are those that think the baroque cycle books are his best.All I know is, no matter what, none of them can be half as bad as the movie that this column was actually about.What the fuck was it? Moonfall? Yeah, that’s gonna suck giant monkey dicks.
Stephenson used to do abrupt endings (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon) and while they were often unsatisfying they usually came after a lot of good stuff beforehand and can thematically work as massive shifts that create a new world, so stopping with a leap off the precipice isn’t unfair. But he lost his fastball bad with REAMDE and as noted the last third of Seveneves is a different story, he’s pushing himself to land the cliff jumps of before and it’s an interesting idea but it doesn’t work. But Anathem and Baroque Cycle are great start to finish.
Yeah, that was my first thought: “so, it’s Seveneves, but dumb?”
“The Master Of Disaster” – I’m assuming that nickname refers to his casting choices for the Stonewall movie.
I hope the movie includes talking head segments from “Fix News” saying how the whole thing is a hoax to harm the President’s re-election and the President (possibly a CGI gourd) says the moon’s orbit will one day fix itself and then the moon kills us all.I’d stream that movie from home.
“Do you know what happens to a planet that gets hit by a moon? The same thing that happens to everything else.”
Prediction: If a known jerk/asshole type is cast as her male lead… she’ll be married to him within the year. Worst taste in men in American history.
“Halle Berry and Josh Gad might seem like an odd coupling better suited for the comedy section at Blockbuster circa 1998…”Grasp again for the attempt at snark, Britt. Gad didn’t befoul our entertainment screens before 2005.
Melancholia (2011)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/
Sounds fun. Let’s hope it’s closer to 2012 than to Independence Day: Resurgence, quality-wise.
“Emmerich’s latest disasterpiece”.Meh, they all come across a bit disasturbatory for my taste.
Welcome to the Moon.
Jason Clarke has a weird face. I don’t like it when he’s in movies. Maura Tierney, on the other hand, should be in every movie.