Moonfall is a moonfail
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s… not exciting enough
Film Reviews Moonfall
A quick poke around YouTube will turn up multiple computer-animated videos demonstrating what Earth’s sky would look like were the moon’s orbit significantly closer (or, say, were the planet instead orbited by a giant banana). Offering a more expensive, more spectacular, much dumber version of that hypothetical scenario, Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall imagines a global crisis in which a handful of courageous Americans (plus one expat Brit) must team up to prevent our natural satellite—which may not be so natural after all—from veering so close that it’ll be torn apart by Earth’s tidal forces and rain a zillion civilization-ending meteors down upon us. (That’s an actual phenomenon, triggered at a specific distance called the Roche limit—a rare instance of Moonfall being scientifically accurate. Interstellar this ain’t.) The film’s more or less a mashup of Emmerich’s two wheelhouses: alien contact (Stargate, Independence Day) and cataclysmic disasters (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), with some Armageddon thrown in for good measure. You will actually hear your brain cells commit seppuku as you watch it.
For no very good reason—a phrase that describes numerous aspects of this movie—Moonfall opens a decade ago, introducing astronauts Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) as they perform satellite maintenance. A barely seen object impacts the moon, sending debris flying and causing the death of a third astronaut who might as well have been wearing a red Star Trek uniform. Harper, who insists that he witnessed an intelligent entity, gets drummed out of NASA, only to be vindicated 10 years later when astronomers observe that the moon’s orbit has suddenly shifted, with the body now approaching Earth so rapidly that the next three months (as orbitally defined) will last only three weeks… at which point the moon will disintegrate.
As it inevitably turns out, Harper, who once successfully landed a spacecraft that had lost all power, is the only person qualified to save the world, though he’ll need the help of both Fowler, whose prior lack of support he resents, and an amateur astronomer and “mega-structuralist” named KC (John Bradley, best known as Samwell on Game Of Thrones).
KC’s a perfect example of how inept Moonfall can be even by the relatively low standards of big-budget popcorn fare. The character functions primarily as comic relief—he’s an excitable nerd—but also fills a standard disaster-movie role: the ordinary schmo who first spots some anomaly and struggles to get those in power to believe him. KC works as a university janitor, sneaking into professors’ offices and downloading satellite data, and he figures out on his own that the moon’s orbit has altered. (He also believes that the moon is artificial and hollow, but skip that for now.) “You knew all this was happening before NASA,” Harper marvels at one point.
KC didn’t, though. We’re shown NASA scientists coming to the same conclusion at roughly the same time, because Berry’s continuing presence in the movie (Fowler still works at NASA) would otherwise be superfluous. KC does make the information public, but that’s fairly irrelevant too, as people would have noticed the gigantic moon and the massive tidal flooding and the gravitational wonkiness soon enough without his help. He’s really just around because the formula demands at least one impassioned, goofy everyman who can crack the occasional joke.
Still, at least Bradley, while frequently annoying in his exuberance, has a demonstrable pulse. Berry and Wilson are stuck playing utterly generic can-do types, and you can practically see them grimacing through much of their alternately functional and dopey dialogue. Asked to fly to the moon and find out what’s causing the aberration, Harper initially declines, insisting that he’s got his own problems to deal with. Fowler’s incredulous, instant-camp-classic reply: “And the moon falling onto Earth isn’t one of them?!” Other so-bad-they’re-hilarious moments include Fowler’s estranged husband (Eme Ikwuakor) pulling a gun on his military superiors right before they attempt to nuke the moon (with Fowler on it), and Harper’s teenage son (Charlie Plummer) getting pinned by a huge uprooted tree trunk and then rescued by the moon’s gravitational pull as it rises over the entire horizon. Pity poor Donald Sutherland, who literally gets wheeled out for perhaps the most pointless cameo in cinema history, and Kelly Yu, playing a heroic exchange student whose intended appeal to the crucial Chinese market couldn’t be more transparent.
Does Moonfall at least deliver the F/X goods? Yes and no. The natural-disaster stuff—massively destructive tsunamis, fireballs, earthquakes, etc.—is so familiar at this point as to be soporific, and placing a much larger moon in the background of those shots doesn’t make them significantly more thrilling. (This time it’s the Chrysler Building that goes down in New York City; the rebuilt One World Trade Center, a.k.a. the Freedom Tower, is pointedly left standing.)
More entertaining, but also painfully stupid, is the moon’s big secret (as predicted by ostensible crackpot KC), which involves a malevolent form of artificial intelligence. Visually, this lifeform is as close as we’ve come to an adaptation of Prey, Michael Crichton’s novel about homicidal nanobots. There’s also some Contact-adjacent hooey—benign intelligence presenting as holographic loved ones, constructed from the person’s memories—and the design team’s best guess at what the interior of a Dyson sphere might look like. Emmerich just tossed every sci-fi and disaster trope he could think of into a blender and hit “liquefy.” The result’s a whole lot lumpier than most palates will prefer.
252 Comments
Honestly, I was hoping it’d be an F grade level of awful. At least then it might be fun to watch. A D+ just sounds painful.
I just wish it had been Vishnevetsky reviewing this. No offence to Mike, but Ignatiy knows how to rub a film’s nose in its mess so it knows what it’s done.
Do these kinds of movies even need/warrant a review? If the trailers made you wanna see it, you’re gonna see it. Let’s face it. At some point—tomorrow, next week, ten years from now—we’re all going to watch Moonfall.Also, this seems like the kind of movie/role Patrick Wilson can’t escape. There’s an alternate universe out there where he picks a much better agent who realizes he’s too attractive for this shit.
There’s good lizard-brain entertainment, there’s harmless time-wasters, and there’s pointless ineptitude. This is clearly the latter, so I appreciate the heads-up.
True, but at least this is in SPACE. If I have to choose between this, and say, The 355, for some brainless action, I’m picking the sci-fi one every single time.
Fair enough – that one just looked like agony.
Though something like The 355 can be brought in at a fraction of Moonfall’s budget.Not relevant from the standpoint of deciding which one to watch, but relevant from the standpoint of which one to produce.(Moonfall looks a lot more fun to me as well – if I’m picking nonsense to watch, it’s going to be the nonsense that involves celestial bodies breaking up instead of half- baked spy antics.)
“Though something like The 355 can be brought in at a fraction of Moonfall’s budget.”
Sure, but when the fraction is 1/2, that’s not a great argument. If Moonfall cost 150M and The 355 cost 20M you might have an argument.
If the question is “Do we make one Moonfall or two 355s?”, I think the answer should always be one Moonfall.
And that doesn’t even bring in the argument of which movie will be more popular globally.
It directed me to that banana video, so absolutely 100% yes it is warranted.
Weird AF. But I found some other very good videos while I was on that page (National Geographic’s “History of the Earth”).
At least for me Anything below a B on AV club, makes me rexamine if I want to see it or not, if I was interested in it before. Sometimes I still see it, sometimes I dont, its just another data point.
I’ve only seen 3 Roland Emmerich films (Independence Day, Stargate, and The Patriot), so really doubt I will watch this ever, let alone in 10 years’ time.
You watched The Patriot, so let’s pump the breaks on pretending you’re better than watching this.
The review itself is the entertainment I’m after: I love reading reviews that tear apart terrible movies. (No shade on D’Angelo’s talents but Ignatiy is the grand master of that around here.)However, this movie does sound like it’ll be fantastic to watch while high when it shows up on streaming in three weeks.
I just expressed a very similar sentiment. Every now and then I’ll go back and read IV’s review of that Steven Segal movie I’ve never bothered to remember the name of, and bask in its glory.
Patrick Wilson = a *slightly* more attractive, significantly less funny Will Arnett.Discuss.
Would Flaked have been less funny if it starred Patrick Wilson instead? I don’t know, because neither I nor anybody else watched it.
I saw….half of the first episode…
I watched it for about fifteen minutes and thought, “Huh, Will Arnett gets to play himself and we get to see an attractive young lady’s tits.”
The cinematographer Wally Pfister directed four episodes of that. He hasn’t done a feature since Transcendence.
I’d argue that his career has arced more toward a direct-to-DVD Chris Pratt. Which is utterly bizarre considering where he started.
Ugh, Patrick Wilson was so DILF-hot in that movie with Kate Winslet (they’re like ordinary parents and meet one another at the local public pool).
Little Children is the worst thing that ever happened to Patrick Wilson, because it clearly shows he can do better stuff. He just doesn’t. If i’d never seen that, I would have absolutely zero opinion on this bowl of extremely attractive oatmeal.
He’s also absolutely incredible in the 2003 HBO adaptation of Angels in America. (Which is incredible all over, definitely check it out if you can).
Seriously. I went to see Independence Day: Resurgence and knew exactly what I was getting. It delivered. Was it a good movie? No. Did it entertain the fuck out of me? Holy shit yes.
I think Emmerich’s movies have varied in quality. Though it’s been a while since he had a particularly successful one.
I can wager any amount of money I won’t actually see Moonfall. Ever. Some directors you learn your lessons from in your teenage years and go decades without bothering to see their work again
If those were the rules, they wouldn’t review Marvel movies
In the future everyone will watch ‘Moonfall’ – for fifteen minutes.
“Let’s face it. At some point—tomorrow, next week, ten years from now—we’re all going to watch Moonfall.”No. No fucking way. Not even for the camp stupidity. No. (I haven’t seen one of this moron’s movies since the inexplicably overrated Independence Day. I’m certainly not going to start with this brain-dead garbage.)
I haven’t seen a movie trailer in several years
I am firmly in the John Waters camp: there is no such thing as a bad movie, only a boring one.Does the trailer look amazingly braindead? Yes, but it also looks hella fun too.
I find it hilarious the Emmerich is trying to claim that Marvel isn’t doing anything original anymore.Like, this is the same guy who made an entire movie that argued that Shakespeare couldn’t right Shakespeare based entirely on the premise that “Poors Can’t Art Good!”.The guy who both whitewashed and ciswashed the Stonewall RiotsThe guy whose cinematic motif is blowing up famous landmarks.
Either he’s using “original” to mean “not based on existing IP”, or he’s completely delusional. Possibly, both.
Which is kind of hypocritical considering he made Godzilla (1999).
#notmyGodzilla
Also his leads are Catwoman/Storm and Nite Owl/Orm.
From the article linked in the tweet:“Oh yes,” Emmerich tells Den of Geek when asked if the disaster genre has changed in recent years. “Because naturally Marvel and DC Comics, and Star Wars, have pretty much taken over. It’s ruining our industry a little bit, because nobody does anything original anymore.” [[emphasis mine]]And from later:Says Emmerich, “There were [The Adventures of Tintin comics], but they were very childish and there were no superheroes. So that’s why at the very beginning, superheroes didn’t work in Germany. They needed 10 or 15 years [of movies] to get to the same level as the rest of the world…. But I just have never found any interest in that kind of movie.”Kinda frames his answers in a slightly different light from the tweet you shared, but that’s to be expected from tweets.
I agree that the quotes in the tweet set their own framing but the actual linked interview makes Emmerich look even worse. It’s basically him bitching about how his moronic, high budget movies have been supplanted by other movies. His argument isn’t that the domination of Marvel and Star Wars franchises have muscled out films by good filmmakers, just that they muscled out his endless parade of ludicrous disaster movie crap with paper thin characters.
Just curious, but: where in the “interview” does he say these things you’re mentioning? That article is a whole lot of editorialization and very few actual quotes from the man himself, outside of what I quoted. And before anyone gets all uppity: I think his movies are generally horseshit, so I’m more goig after the idea that there’s an awful lot of putting words in his mouth going on here.
It must be utterly bizarre as a famous person to have a regular, fairly chill conversation with a reporter and then have the general understanding of your remarks condensed into the least charitable interpretation of a single sentence. I get that it’s just part of being a public figure these days, but I’d find it awful to experience.
Man brought some m-f’in context.
He’s just full of himself and mad that people don’t flock to see his films. Almost every majorly successful movie is based on pre-created material is based on a existing IP (almost).
Let’s look at the IMDb top 250 movies of all time.
1. Shawshank Redemption (based on a book)
2-3. The Godfather Part 1 and 2 (based on a book)
4. The Dark Knight (based on the comic books)
5. 12 Angry Men (based on a teleplay of the same name)
6. Schindler’s List (based on the real-life Oscar Schindler)
7. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (based the Tolkein books,)
8. Pulp Fiction (original)
9. The good, the Bad and the Ugly (original)
10. Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (based the book, obviously)
11. Fight Club (surprisingly based on a book)
12. Forrest Gump (also based on a book)
What about the top grossing movies of all time? Non-inflation adjusted
1. Avatar (original, but still very similar to Dances With Wolves and Disney’s Atlantis)
2. Avengers: Endgame (based on the comics)
3. Titanic (loosely based on the real thing)
4. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (sequel to a pre-existing IP)
5. Avengers: Infinity War (based on the comics)
6. Spider-Man: No Way Home (based on the comics)
7. Jurassic World (sequel to a pre-existing IP)
8. The Lion King, 2019 (remake of a pre-existing IP)
9. The Avengers (based on the comics)
10. Furious 7 (sequel to a pre-existing IP)
11. Frozen 2 (sequel to a pre-existing IP)
12. Avengers: Age of Ultron (based on the comics)13 and onward from here is just more of the same… both comic and book adaptations and lots of sequels. Suffice to say, Hollywood has been running on pre-existing ideas for a very long time. He’s wrong to point to Marvel, but I can see his point (only slightly) if he just points at Disney… who had a hand in producing 9 out of the 12 top grossing movies of all time, and all of them based on pre-existing IPs. But still, it’s not like he’s making better movies.
You get the same thing from the Best Picture winners since the award was created, but it’s worth mentioning that at least those are all based on different books, plays, and movies.
I’m actually very surprised the Lion King remake is so high on the list.
As a side note to your list, the most watched film at box office based on admissions is Gone With The Wind (based on a book).Hollywood hasn’t been original since Oliver Hardy played the Tin Man in the first Wizard of Oz film. I jest of course.
an entire movie that argued that Shakespeare couldn’t right Shakespeare based entirely on the premise that “Poors Can’t Art Good!”.
“Roland Emmerich was so disappointed with Game of Thrones’ ending he approached showrunner Benioff about it”https://wikiofthrones.com/roland-emmerich-was-so-disappointed-with-game-of-thrones-ending-he-approached-showrunner-benioff-about-ithttps://collider.com/roland-emmerich-moonfall-sequel-plans-interview-game-of-thrones-ending/Had you been a fan of Game of Thrones?EMMERICH: Oh, yes. But like only from two or three on. Season two or three on. I was at the beginning, very skeptical.I think that the show definitely got better as it went and then it didn’t land the way that I think we all wanted it to land.EMMERICH: Exactly. The last season. What the fuck?Yes. I agree with that statement.EMMERICH: I know David really well, so I said, “What the fuck?”I really wanted to see the end of Game of Thrones with the Night King winning. How amazing would it have been if the end of the show was the Night King on the throne, and we were watching the end of this entire civilization because they couldn’t work together. And because they were unwilling to share power, the villain wins.EMMERICH: Yeah. Then they would have had another Game of Thrones, how to get the Night King off the throne.Well, they’re doing a prequel, but think about it. We’ve never seen the villain win in a show like this.EMMERICH: No, that would have been great, but they write for other reasons. I mean, why did this kid who didn’t have anything to do with this whole thing like ends up on the throne? I have no idea.(“Let them fight …”)
Of all the stupid complaints about the GOT final season, my most hated are the White Walkers whiners. You missed the fucking point.
I can’t help but think maybe, just maybe, some of the amazing sci-fi books out there dying to be adapted could have gotten a toe in the zeitgeist, but then Emmerich cuts the line screaming about blowing up the moon…
And then this, which seems to be an adaptation of the Mr Show “America can, should, must and will blow up the moon” sketch.
Making a stupid comment about marvel is a great way for directors to get their name in the news. Which is exactly what he wants right as his movie is about to open$$
All could think during the trailer was “this looks exactly like 2012 but dumber.” Guy needs to look at his own work.
Can confirm, it was like 2012, but dumber.I fucking LOVED it.
They should have just turned this Mr. Show sketch into a movie
We’re always told to shoot for the Moon. But what happens when the Moon
[DUN-DUN]
shoots
[DUN-DUN]
for US?
Anyway, this sounds a lot less fun than an adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s batshit scifi novel Seveneves, which has the all-time classic opening line hook: ‘The moon blew up suddenly and without warning.’
In my country . . .
Seveneves was a great two-thirds of a novel, then a really boring third of a different novel.
As much as I love Stephenson, doesn’t that describe most of his work?
Try saying that about The Diamond Age or Snow Crash. I’m not that hot on Snow Crash, but oh my giddy fucking god, I want an adaptation of The Diamond Age so badly.
In Reamde, the division is like 20% interesting MMO game stuff to 80% gun-nut Clancy-sniffing technothriller. Stephenson needs a real editor, and that editor needs a chainsaw.
Even the MMO stuff stank of “author has never actually seen an MMO, just heard of the concept” because it did all that “This one person is the best MMO player in the world and has secret stuff they’ve unlocked that only they ever can or will” which describes no MMO that has ever or will ever exist.
When I did a semi-pointless creative writing degree at uni, we’d get the odd Comp. Sci. or engineering student take a few of our third-year subjects as an elective – they thought it’d be easy marks because, as we all know, arts aren’t real, and thus difficult, subjects. Without fuckin’ fail, their work was all terrible. And without fuckin’ fail, they were all massive Stephenson fans. Basically, pretty much every decision Neal makes with his writing is wrong and terrible from a literary viewpoint, but for the Stephenson stans, that wrongness was goodness. The lengthy info-dumps. The endless exposition. Talking down to the reader. Chasing word counts. Poor character development. Multi-book anthologies. Look-how-smart-I-am technofetishism. Concept over narrative. Passive fucking voice (because that’s how scientists write and therefore it must be the best way to write). Oh, lord, there were some stinkers, not least of all the Transparent Venusian Vagina.
“The lengthy info-dumps. The endless exposition. Talking down to the reader. Chasing word counts. Poor character development. Multi-book anthologies. Look-how-smart-I-am technofetishism. Concept over narrative. Passive fucking voice (because that’s how scientists write and therefore it must be the best way to write).”Like I said, classic scifi!
He usually whiffs the ending—and while it’s annoying, it’s never bothered me that much because I’ve enjoyed everything else so much—but not the entire last third of the novel. Seveneves was a special case because (UH, SPOILERS, DURRR) it has a significant time jump at the 2/3 mark and the rest of the story follows a completely different set of characters, and that entire section just wasn’t particularly interesting.
I was thinking of Snow Crash, with it’s weird diversion into Babylonian history in the middle, or Anathem with the 600 PAGE SCENE set in a large conference room…
Ending notwithstanding, I really enjoyed Seveneves, but it’s reading shit like this that keeps me from going back for more Stephenson.
Eh, I actually enjoy random diversions, as long as they’re interesting, but then I’m basically endlessly curious about everything. If it’s surrounded by a story or characters I don’t care about, though, that’s the downside (*cough*Fall*cough*).
The Futurama audio commentaries alerted me to the existence of Harry Stephen Keeler, a bizarre sci-fi author who would pen ridiculous plots that never reached the minimum word count his contract required. To get around this, he’d have his main character pick up a book and start reading it, and then insert the text of one of Keeler’s wife’s short stories, so you’d be reading the story of a guy reading another story. Then that would end and the original story would continue. I’d love to read some of his books (even though they’re apparently awful), but I think they’re out of print for fairly obvious reasons.
I liked Seveneves all the way through. I also agree the stories before the time jump were perhaps a bit more fresh/interesting. But I suppose I was just interested enough in the question of what a rebuilt society would look like that I was happy to spend some time in that period.I also agree with the sentiment that if the story had ended with Part Two, it would be a pretty bleak story overall. And I actually liked the sort of retroactive optimism of learning that humanity had in fact managed to survive in other ways. I gather some feel that undermines the drama of the first two parts, but to me it is OK to understand that each distinct group of survivors at least believed the future of the species depended on them.Finally, although not necessary a towering achievement of the genre, I guess I still have a baseline fondness for “really big structures in space!” science fiction. Those were always some of my favorites of the classic science fiction that I read from an early age. Of course I again understand that some people who liked the first two parts found Part Three’s focus on such things tedious. But to me, at least, Part Three was sort of like a day of sledding in the snow followed by a warm cup of cocoa.
Don’t get me wrong; I liked the technical and detail and “really big structures in space” aspects of part 3, but there was basically no story or characterization to speak of. Almost all of it was spent on one character traveling up to the ring from Earth, and then back down to Earth, with only anything of interest actually happening in the last chapter or two, and even that sort of just fizzling out at the end. I’m not saying every novel has to spend its final third on actually telling a compelling story, but that’s what I want out of a novel and Seveneves didn’t provide it.
That’s quite fair. I once heard someone else derisively call it a travelogue. So I would never try to suggest that people who didn’t like it for your reasons were missing something.But for the reasons stated previously, I was personally into it anyway.
Yup. My favourite, Cryptonomicon, is one third Bobby Shaftoe, weird badass Marine, one third Goto Dengo, weird badass Japanese soldier, and one third nerds inventing cryptocurrency.
It’s also got that painful scene where he tries to dissect thought leaders who are being mean by pointing out that second-gen Waterhouse had plenty of advantages in gaining early access as an internet programmer, while second-gen Waterhouse smugly thinks they’re all “hobbits” and he’s a “dwarf” because he actually accomplishes stuff (mostly inventing cryptocurrency and having a ridiculous way to eat Captain Crunch).
If the rest of his work is anything like Reamde, yes. I have been living my whole life with ADD and reading that felt like the inside of my brain.Fucking worth it for the deus ex cougar though.
Stephenson has that problem in general. He has great concepts, writes tolerably well, but usually can’t land an ending.
Ah, Stephen King syndrome.
Hey, hey, hey now: that’s not accurate.Stephenson does not write tolerably well.
I don’t think it’s that his endings are bad. They’re abrupt. There’s no denouement and there are often dangling subplots, but he resolves what he sees as the main plot and doesn’t go a single word further.
Fall, Or Dodge In Hell was a great one-third of a novel then a really boring two thirds of a different novel!
I finished Fall out of a morbid curiosity about whether the story would ever go anywhere interesting (spoiler: it doesn’t). I was a bit annoyed by the supposition that all of this computing power could be supported by a rapidly dwindling world population that was somehow generating infinite money via high-speed stock trading.
I just read Fall a month or so ago. I think I only read about 40 percent of the last third— just started skipping pages 5 and then 10 at a time waiting for the deadly dull quest nonsense to end.
Fall is a frigging masterpiece, it’s just distinct enough (after that first third) from his other work to alienate most of his fanbase.
I like to think of it as a complete novel with an appendix of 150 pages of obsessively detailed world-building notes for Stephenson’s homebrew TTRPG campaign set in the Seveneves universe.
That’s kind of the origin. It started as an RPG and ended up becoming an exploration of the sci-fi trope of humanoid races distinguished by one major characteristic.
[Insert any Neal Stephenson novel here] was a great two-thirds of a novel, then a really boring third of a different novel.
I’d say it was a great 2/3 of a novel, then skipped over about 4 novels, then was the first third of a maybe interesting novel.
Or Jack McDevitt’s similar book where the Moon falls, which is called “Moonfall.”
SPOILERS DAMMIT–COME ON, MAN
Seveneves rules and could make for an incredible 3- or 4-season series.
Oh man, I thought the entire thing about the “white sky” scenario was less “fun” and more… crushingly depressing.I did enjoy the book though, oddly.
I think if I read a book with that opening sentence, I’d stop right there. It’s clearly not going to top that.
I’d say it sounds about the same amount of fun :)At least we can expect Emmerich’s presidents to be upstanding heroes, like in real life. The badly medicated, craven, anti-science president of Seveneves just pushed the limits of my credulity.
Don’t you *dare* try and convince me to read another one of his books again.
Now we just need an adaptation of the fight between a Super Strong Multidimensional Wizard and the Moon (well a mirror copy of it) from the Tsukihime visual novel setting.
Because it’s hard to hate a setting where the Moon sent an uber-vampire to Earth because the Earth asked other heavenly bodies for help killing humanity for being so toxic.Meanwhile, Mercury also sent a Kaiju but it’s just chilling in the rainforest and warping reality..
As a rule of thumb, if the trailer looks terrible, the movie is usually worse. And from the review, that appears to be the case.Also, Patrick Wilson is in it, the human equivalent of Wonder Bread PBJ sandwich. That’s almost always a red flag.
You’re a man of principle, Argie.
Yes, no disrespect to his acting skills, but unfortunately casting Patrick Wilson as the lead (and putting him the center of our triangle of heroes) basically tells the viewer “it’s OK, you can skip this one.”
Not necessarily. Sometimes a bad trailer means a bad movie, but other times the studio just has no idea what a movie is about and makes a trailer that tries to force a movie into a genre which it just isn’t which makes it look terrible. Like “Drive”. I love that movie, but the trailers made it look like a cheap “Fast & Furious” ripoff rather than a thoughtful movie about Ryan Gosling’s character.
With all due to respect but my childhood says Fuck You! WB PBJs were Great! Far better than bologna n mustard or ketchup.
I refuse to believe that Lionsgate’s Pinocchio movie could possibly be any worse than the trailer.
Trailers are never the movie.
He was good in Fargo season 2, but it may well have been that everyone else was so much better that he was lifted by association.
I think Fargo just used him correctly. If you play him as a completely conventional leading man, it will likely be pretty unsatisfactory. But if you actually give him some unusual below-the-surface stuff to do, then it can be interesting. So in Fargo, you have things like Lou struggling to handle the homicide investigation while dealing with his wife having cancer, and Wilson pulls that off quite well. But if it had just been a normal crime drama with a less interesting cop protagonist, I suspect Wilson would have come across as quite meh.I guess what I am saying is certain actors have that ineffable star power in which they can take what are really quite thin leading roles and nonetheless make them entertaining on screen. Wilson does not necessarily have a lot of that, but he can actually act! And that has its uses, in the right role.
You truly underestimate both the appeal and the wholesome goodness of a Wonder Bread PB&J.
I mean, it’s one of the all-time great flavor combos. And the use of that plain ol’ white bread is part of it.
Wait, so he’s not the drummer from Weezer? All this time I’ve been seeing his name attached to bland movies and thinking “oh, good for him”
I’m too lazy to look it up, so I’m going with “maybe?”
He gives a great (and potentially career-endangering) performance in ‘Hard Candy’, which is almost a two-hander with Elliot Page. He’s anything but dull in that.
He’s also good in Stretch, which nobody saw. And he was perfect as Nite Owl, even if the movie, itself, missed the point of Watchmen. The worst thing you can do is cast him in a generic leading man role.
I’m sure he’s a fine human being but I don’t understand Hollywood’s obsession with the guy. He’s like a glass of room temperature milk
He is just as mundane as you remember but he blends in with the rest of them too, especially Halle Berry…..Her “half dismayed face” was her go to in the majority of scenes. Whether thats directors fault or hers or both who knows but the majority seemed to be there for a paycheck and not much else.
I think Emmerich is a guy who was really hurt by the exponential advancement of CGI in the 2000s. His talent for spectacle, which combined some computer graphics with optical and practical effects, was undeniable, even if he was a pretty basic storyteller. But ever since Day After Tomorrow, his movies all look pretty indistinguishable from other dumb big-budget fair. Others caught up to him and CGI allowed him to get lazy. It’s a shame, because I do find his brand of dumb blockbusters entertaining.
Sometimes people have a few good ideas and that’s it. I liked Universal Soldier, I liked Stargate, I liked Independence Day. Those were fun movies, and would have been fun movies even if they didn’t deliver on the spectacle like they did (especially Universal Soldier wasn’t spectacular.)And then he just ran out of ideas that were worthwhile on their own merits, and became completely dependent on how cool they looked on screen. It’s like he learned the worst lesson from Independence Day and was thoroughly unable to unlearn it.
I liked Stargate, but I liked the television franchise more, and I think most fans agree with me. It really says something that when Emmerich considered making a new Stargate movie a few years ago that ignored the TV shows, the overwhelming response was “no thanks, the show were better.” Especially since the new movies would be a trilogy, but the first one would be a reboot of the 1994 movie.The guy occasionally has a cool idea, but has no idea how to exand on any of them.
At this point, I am willing to just say flat out that TV is a better format for interesting world-building-type scifi or fantasy than movies. Even a long feature-length movie is just not enough time, and the typical pacing of sequels is just not quick enough. The LOTR was still a success, of course, but I think that is in part because how they packed so much content into such a short time frame by movie standards—558 minutes within the space of two years. And even then, it was leveraging an extremely well-known property.Now movies can still be good for what I would call interesting philosophical pieces, like 2001, or more recently Arrival, The Martian, Edge of Tomorrow, or so on. And in cases where lots of world-building is already in place, like Star Wars, the MCU, or Mad Max, then maybe it is less of an issue to add new movies which incrementally build on those worlds.But starting fresh with a world-building type property these days, I would almost always prefer a TV show.
Most of the time movie ideas don’t really need a lot of expansion. Stargate just didn’t seem like the kind of flick that demanded a sequel, and looking back it isn’t that surprising that the TV series retconned a bunch of stuff and added in a lot of stuff. I liked SG1, and Atlantis, and even Universe (eventually), but they drifted pretty far away from what the original movie set up.That being said, one of the benefits of a show is that it can spend a lot more time on its world and characters. So wanting to go back to ‘mysterious slaver aliens with pyramid starships and Jack O’Neil (one ‘L’. The other guy is a total snarky cut-up) is a standard tortured taciturn military dude’ is going to be a nonstarter with all of the development that the shows had put in over their fifteen collective seasons.
I think his films lack color, which is one of the big issues that plagues a lot of CGI-heavy stuff. They mute everything to hide a lot of the blemishes/fakeness but it just ends up looking kinda dull.
That’s definitely a good point, about Emmerich specifically and the CGI era in general. Nostalgia aside, plenty of 90s films were extremely ugly (like, extremely, extremely ugly) but they weren’t as same-y as the current crop, and color’s a big reason way. And of course it’s crazy watching a modern movie and then watching a Technicolor musical. Digital color correction is an incredible tool when used well, but man it’s reduced a lot of modern films to wallpaper.
It’s also very hard for directors to manage a virtual “camera.” There was a certain economy in shot selection and framing when the camera either had to focus on a miniature or hide the seams between the live and CGI elements. It’s more visually interesting than the massive swooping/panning shots they do with CGI cameras (even Spielberg gets caught up in that).
I can’t stand overdone drone shots, particularly in period movies. It completely takes me out of the scene knowing this robot bird it buzzing all around the characters that are supposed to be traipsing through 17th century highlands or something.
It used to be that a rule of thumb for CG was to only do what a real camera could do. With drones, life imitates CG, and now real cameras can do all that.
I could not agree with both of you more. Losing an implied realistic point of view is a big problem for me. Of course every once in a while, directors would do unusual shots. But typically they had a lot of thought behind why that particular shot made sense. Now it feels very overdone to me in many action movies, and ironically is making them all feel more bland and less special.
Also true – a lot of those movies are essentially directed in the animatic phase. The shots you’re talking about always seem like video game cut scenes to me.
You read my mind. I still associate busy pans/zooms through a CGI environment with the PS2 era. Everyone is just trying to make their own version of Evil Dead Regeneration.
My interest in this moon film is waning.
Not to wax philosophical on the topic, but this movies seems full of it.
I love crescent rolls!
this thread is made of cheese
If you look closely at the trailer, you can see a rabbit in it.
*drops pants, shows butt*
Does it cause a tidal wave when you do that?
I like supermassive butts with their own gravity well and I cannot lie.
I’m gonna MOON ya, man! Also
I’m behind you on that one.
I’m gonna beat cheeks to the theater!
I love gibbous rolls! Wait, what?
Well, at least we’ve got this review to gibbous forewarning that the film is terrible.
It’s gonna crater at the box office.
You’re a lunar joke lander.
I booked Friday night tickets for Moonfall last week and as of today, we’re STILL the only two seats that have sold in the entire theater, lol…
Find tranquility at your base friend. It will all be over soon.
Eclipsed by something else?
I’m still keen, as it does feature the heavenly body of Halle Berry.
I’m over it.
Well it looks laughably bad in the trailers so this isn’t surprising. No way I was gonna pay to see this. But a couple years from now if its on cable or HBO? Yeah, pass the weed over and I’ll watch maybe 30 to 40 minutes to laugh at its badness
Years? Yeah, this’ll be on streaming before the month is out.
Halfway through the runtime at the cinema there’ll be a title-card saying, “This film is now available to stream. We’ll understand if you wish to go home now and catch up with this later.”
Honestly, I’ve ff-ed through the commercial a few times and figured it was a streaming release.
Hey, it’s on HBO now! (I watched it the other night. It’s exactly as dumb as we all thought, but in that Emmerich bad-good way.)
I think I’d be more disappointed if it were good and you didn’t get to use that headline.
Thank god this movie is here to save the movie industry from Marvel and Star Wars.https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/roland-emmerich-marvel-star-wars-ruining-our-industry/
Ive enjoyed Rolands movies for years for what they were: destruction scenes….but the plots blur together because of how alike they are to eachother. Moonfalls characters are basically clones of 2012: divorced dad trying to connect with family who has new step dad (who also dies), government coverup, guy who knows the truth but no one listens to, and government guy who stands up to his superiors. Pretty rich of him to say “It’s ruining our industry a little bit, because nobody does anything original anymore”.
The headline should’ve just been “Moonfail”. Simple. Elegant.
The Moon Adventures of Harper & Fowler
Not on this site. Given the number of typos here, most people would just autocorrect it in their minds, missing the joke.
I stopped noticing ages ago since I assume someone in the comments will let me know of any and all errors in the articles.
I think “moon-fail!” would have been a safer bet. More noticeable for the clicks.
The SEO gods would not have been pleased.
Moonfall Moonfails and Moonflails for an audience.
“Just ‘Moonfail’. It’s cleaner.”
seeing “Kelly Yu” made me wonder whatever happened to Kelly Hu, who was in the awful Scorpion King. Turns out she works a TON just not in many big name projects (she was on Arrow for a while) and does a lot of voice acting.
She’s been in The Orville a couple of times, and that’s a really enjoyable show if Star Trekkin’ is your jam.
I was happy when Arrow brought Kelly Hu as China White back for its final season, though as usual they really didn’t give her enough to doBetter than the disrespect she got on The 100 though where they wrote her character off after the pilot & killed her off off-screen & never mentioned her again
Lotta good actors got disrespected by ‘The 100′. That was kind of the show’s thing, sadly.
To me she’ll always be the dancefloor kill in Jason Takes Manhattan.
I actually thought “Yu” was a typo (you know how things are here).
Sunset Beach gives her (and anyone else from that cast) a lifetime pass for me.That show was batshit crazy and a cult hit over here in UK, with some added snark from tv continuity announcers.
I was sincerely hoping this movie was based on the Jack McDevitt book of the same title, which was hugely entertaining but no such luck.
KC works as a university janitor, sneaking into professors’ offices and downloading satellite data, and he figures out on his own that the moon’s orbit has altered. It’s amazing how well this sums up the worldview for so many people. The experts are morons, and 1 in 20 janitors or pizza delivery folks are brilliant minds who could deliver us a utopia were it not for those elites in their ivory towers.
Can you blame them? Ladders that once dangled more freely have been pulled up over the last 3 decades to all those not born connected.
As a scientist, we’re used to it by now. Nothing surprises me anymore. We’re all just a bunch of incompetent blowhards who have no idea what they’re talking about. I believe an extremely memorable rant in a far superior movie on the same topic just about sums it up.
“I don’t need your fancy-pants diplomas, pal. I got my degree at the college of Being a Real American!”*group of soldiers cheers, monocle that the scientist inexplicably wears shatters on the ground*
And how little screenwriters understand the modern world of menial work. A university janitor these days is a subcontracted gig worker who gets sent to new jobs each shift, while said shifts are heavily surveilled and stacked with little to no free time. The system has been designed to crush any dreams of Good Will Hunting shit.
Well, we always need new MST3K fodder.
Push the button, Chuck!
Roland, Roland, Roland,
See the moon’s a-fallin’,
No one likes your movie,Raw HIDE!!!
A week and a half ago, I went to see the Mystery Science Theater 3000 live tour. This particular tour is based on a movie Emmerich made in the 1980s, “Making Contact.” Man, is it bad. It’s hard to even imagine that the director of “Making Contact” went on to make “Independence Day.” “Making Contact” is just a huge mess, an attempt to rip off multiple Spielberg or Spielberg-adjacent movies *simultaneously*. (One of the interstitial skits was based on “Spielburger Helper,” a box dinner which comes in different flavors depending on which Spielberg movie you want to imitate.) and it’s just clunky and nonsensical and all over the place. Emmerich made it while he was still in Germany, but he intended it for the international market so he cast all his kids from the school at an American military base. Seeing it riffed by MST3K made for a very entertaining evening, but the movie itself would have been near-unwatchable otherwise.
From what I recall it was heavily re-edited for its American release, so maybe the original version isn’t as messy?
“placing a much larger moon in the background of those [mass destruction] shots doesn’t make them significantly more thrilling.” Well, I don’t know. We’ve seen aliens of every stripe in their various space ships blowing up the earth. We’ve seen earthquakes and volcanoes. Maybe old Mr. Moon can make something new of it.
Just as long as it is clear our hero can run just fast enough to escape the Moon as it is coming for him . . . .
Yooo AVClub, I’ve been a verified/ungrey commenter for like 3 years up to as recently as last night at 11pm. And now I’m going into Pending. What the fuck
You’re not grey to me…
This one got lifted by someone, but I’m back to being grey by default.
This site really does suck. I’ve been on these boards for DECADES (admittedly under different user names) and I’m grey everywhere but the AV Club.
At the kinjacalypse I was in the greys, then out, in, out, and now I’m in again, for a couple years now. And I’ve been a regular here forever.
I remember Josh Gad was supposed to play the Bradley role originally, and this may be one of those cases where Josh Gad would have been an improvement.
Up until this very moment I thought that was Josh Gad. Actually, that’s not true. I thought it was that guy whose name I forgot and know realize was Josh Gad.
I never understood the Josh Had hate bc I’ve never seen him in anything. Last weekend I watched Little Monsters and now I totally get it.
I can’t wait to turn past this while channel surfing Starz..
lol wtf is channel surfing
It’s when you can mindlessly switch between programs and not see this.
I’ve said this somewhere else but this movie looks like the trailer of the Moonrapers movie we never got!
For those of you who don’t get that reference, it was a Billboard with Affleck on it in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back!I love Patrick Wilson but come on man, pass on this shit. Now I will watch it drunk at like 1AM one year on TBS.
Emmerich already made a moonrapers movie. It’s called Moon 44, and the characters are dividable into two groups: wimpy youngsters, and the space jocks who rape them all the time.
Oh god this sounds awful and probably what Kevin Smith had in mind!
“duhn-duhn”
It’s not LA Law.
Nobody talks about Ghost Chase any more. And few have the courage to mention that this isn’t even Emmerich’s first moon movie – and heck, even Independence Day Revisited had some moon footage, and the original Independence Day had that moment when the mothership shakes out Armstrong’s footprint as it passes the moon. So the man has mooned us many times before. And again, what about Ghost Chase?
Hooey is a great word. I gotta start using it more.
All that was needed was to mention who was in it Halle Berry. Pass!
This remake doesn’t hold a candle to the original.
I have it on good authority that this film was hamstrung by Marvel, DC and Star Wars movies. It would have all made perfect sense if Disney hadn’t beaten up Roland Emmerich and stolen his lunch money.
there’s a lot of good movies that don’t get any attention that could use reviews in AVclub. bashing moonfall is fun tho I guess?
It really, really is.
Nicolas Cage & Cher star in their own inevitable porn parody: Moonfuck
It’s a documentary.
“You will actually hear your brain cells commit seppuku as you watch it.” I love that line in the review. On another site a dude who saw it revealed once the embargo on reviews had ended that he gives it a F. This is going to be so fun to watch when it hits cable/streaming sites.
I bet it has a montage of famous cities being destroyed, but not a single Chinese one, right? Was this a Chinese-funded movie?And tell us more about the hollow Moon thing. Because the director plans to make a trilogy.
Maybe they destroy Taipei in the movie. The Chinese would probably go for that.
I want to hear more about these trilogy plans. Your first movie reveals the moon is hollow and it almost wipes out the globe, and you’re going to follow that up with two more? What’s planned for Moonfall 2: Sun Down?
The moon being a dyson sphere is the smaller part of the over all problem. The overall problem was only possibly delayed for now. The set up is there, and if a sequel is made, the focus will be less on the moon now and focused on the larger threat revealed there.
That makes sense, they really want to save the sun for the third one.
“You will actually hear your brain cells commit seppuku as you watch it.”I rarely laugh these days, but this one made me lol, good work.
This reads like the movie is exactly what it’s supposed to be. I’m kind of excited.
Reading this review, I can’t help but think of We Hate Movies’ takedown of Independence Day: Resurgence, where one of the guys, doing an atrocious German accent has Emmerich saying, “I like the script, it rings a little familiar, but that’s a movie, no? But let me ask you one question: where is the nerd? It needs a fat nerd…”I wonder how much of the mess we’re currently in with QAnon and a sizable portion of the population being unable to agree on the basic premises of factual reality traces back to three decades of popular movies promoting the stock character of the crazy nerd conspiracy theorist…whose conspiracy theory just happens to be exactly right! The fact that we’re still doing this in 2022 is a bad sign.
Sad that Halle Berry’s comeback has her in such garbage movies. Ah well.
When I saw the trailer for this, I genuinely couldn’t tell whether this was just a dumb movie or a movie that knew it was dumb and was leaning into it. This review confirms that it’s probably the former. Good to know.
Yeah, same, I was pretty certain it was an intentional spoof until this review. The more recent TV spots and trailers seem to really focus on the comic relief/sheer ridiculousness. It seemed weird for a major-studio, Emmerich-directed (a guy that doesn’t seem to understand camp or irony in the slightest and takes everything deathly seriously), February-dumped film to go for that sort of tone/have that sort of faith in its audience–which is essential for parody/satire that isn’t completely hamfisted–so I guess it makes more sense that it’s supposed to be played straight.
They made a movie based on an Ancient Aliens episode……
I would start to say that maybe Dean Devlin is the brains of their sometime partnership, but then I remember Geostorm.
i knew this would suck because:“Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall”
How many times is Roland Emmerich gonna destroy the earth?
Independence DayThe Day after TomorrowIndependence Day 2: Electric Destructaboo2012Moonfall
like change the record, brah!like for sure, totally!
How many times are people on the internet going to make tired “Electric Boogaloo” jokes? Especially when “boogaloo” is this generation’s “helter-skelter” thanks to the alt-right.
Considering how appealing the complete destruction of Earth is in 2022, he might be having a career renaissance.
Well, I have no reason to see this now that I know the gag is “the moon is a Dyson sphere” and not “the moon is an egg”.What I’m saying is I was really hoping the moon would be an egg in this
(…are rare instance of Moonfall being scientifically accurate. Interstellar this ain’t.)
. I have bad news for you… Interstellar was not terribly scientifically accurate either. Ask an actual astrophysicist about what effect gravitational forces strong enough to cause time dilation would have on lifeforms crossing into them from a 1G environment…Anyway, Moonfall already had two strikes against it — Halle Berry and Roland Emmerich — and the reviews I’ve seen of the plot make three.
I’m sick of all these movies and TV shows that say there’s something sinister on/in/that is the moon. We used to imagine cool domed cities on the moon where we all hung out with weird rings on our clothes. I want some more of that optimistic moon stuff. You can still make it exciting. Imagine, the biggest luxury hotel in the new moon colony is about to open, but some ‘Die Hard’-esque criminals want to blow it up! Only Moon Bruce Willis can save us now!
Die Cheesier.
god I hate this stuff but that trailer was mesmerizing I need a big dose of this shiny garbage thank you Emmerich
Am I the only one who read… (plus one expat Brit)…and thought of “The crew is a good mix of British and American actors, giving everything a vaguely international feel.” from Alasdair Beckett-King’s “Guy Who Is About To Die In Space” video?
There is zero chance you didn’t have this headline (along with 2 others) ready to go before you ever wrote the review. I mean, it’s a softball, but sometimes you still have to take that swing.
Saw this one last night and my heart sank when the credits rolled and Tencent appeared. I’m convinced that Chinese Hollywood partnerships is the reason why this film is so terrible. All of the big budget films that come out of Hollywood that have been financed by China seem to have been run through a censorship machine to make sure it doesn’t offend either market and as a result they (probably) appeal to neither. The effects are not bad and the acting is … okay but the dialogue is just off. So many of the characters do things that just don’t make sense. Every character seems to exhibit a fatalism that they occasionally overcome. The whole thing is a mixed bag of sci-fi tropes from better films (most of them made by Roland Emmerich). Truly, I really didn’t have great expectations but I was still disappointed.
So worse than all the Marvel films he just slagged off?
He’s really just around because the formula demands at least one impassioned, goofy everyman (Brit) who can crack the occasional joke. So even Simon Pegg and Nick Frost chose not to sink this low?
Thanks , I’ll give it a watch. If the av club hates it , it can’t be all bad.
Don’t thank me, thank the gravitational pull of the moon!
I feel better now. I had seen ads for a movie with a hollow moon, and ads for a movie with the moon crashing to earth, and I couldn’t tell whether I was dealing with one movie, or one of those weird swarms where three or so big action films with nearly identical premises come out at the same time. Now I know.
Interstellar ruined scifi. Now people expect accuracy in their fantasy movies.
I wonder if you saw this movie and took avid notes if you could get Joe Rogan to buy in to the “Moon is hollow and home to a malevolent AI” theory.
I cannot wait to make fun of this garbage fire of a movie! We’re actually planning to do so for Valentine’s Day. Since covid started, my husband and I have been making fun of every disaster movie, big budget and otherwise, we can find and we’re running out of movies to watch.
If the moon explodes, it will lead us to this:
KC works as a university janitor, sneaking into professors’ offices and downloading satellite data, and he figures out on his own that the moon’s orbit has altered. this is the point in the plot where if I had been dumb enough to buy a ticket to this dreck I would have blurted out “oh COME ON” and left. Man that is one hilariously implausible plot point.
This is what happens when you don’t learn from your other flops and think you’re hot shit because you got lucky with Independence Day – 25 years ago.You can’t continue to write scripts on the toilet in less than a month and think it will be successful.
https://screenrant.com/independence-day-2-will-smith-exit-effects-script/
The trailer and ads looks pretty cheesy. But 2012 was very cheesy and I loved it. I still count The Day After Tomorrow as one of my most memorable theater experiences. Independence Day and especially Stargate are formative movies for me – they are among the ones that turned me into a die-hard movie lover. I guess I’m saying I really like Roland Emmerich and am still going to see this despite some skepticism.
My fiance and I are fans of Roland Emmerich. We have gone to 2012 and Resurgence in the theaters with no question. My fiance is even more of a fan of his movies than I am ( he rewatches many on DVDs on his days off) and even he was not a fan of this movie. I think the interpersonal relationships they ham fisted into this movie took away from it overall. The destruction and action scenes were pretty bombastic, we both enjoyed them. Out of all his movies I found this one pretty terrible overall. If you are fan of Roland I dont blame you for going anyway, we did too because of that….but now im a bit more weary of his work if it continues like this.
If I knew “What if the moon was faked? Like, The Actual Moon?” could get greenlit, I’d have a summer blockbuster out of a few bong rips.
After reading this review and watching the trailer, I can’t WAIT to see this movie (once it comes to a streaming service that I already subscribe to and won’t have to pay extra for it).
I went to see this, willingly, for I dance the path of madness, the black spiral that leads us to the Wyrm, to true wisdom. Anyway.
It was awful. You knew this – but let me tell you something you may NOT realize about why it’s bad. It’s not the dialogue, the bad science, the bad sci-fi, etc.
Every single person in this movie is on some kind of downer. The MOON is literally going to CRASH into the EARTH. Right? You would expect a movie like this to maybe have a solemn monologue from a scientist about all the implications of this. We know it’s going to be bad, but I guarantee you could write some pretty sweet, scenery-chewing stuff for an actor to go on about. Because, you know – the world would end. Right?But no, the entire cast, from start to finish, act more like they just realized they didn’t turn their term paper in on time. You know? So obviously a little panicked, but not really, REALLY calling attention to all the fucked up stuff that is or is about to be happening.Roland used to get very good performances out of people. He didn’t have THE WORST CAST to deal with here. And yet the whole thing feels almost like a prank on us. I’ve never seen people so robotically take a paycheck. It’s fucking terrible.
My fiance who adores anything remotely related to end of the world sort of stuff even disliked this movie, and he watches some of the biggest C level dreck out there. His biggest issue was the cut aways from the destruction to focus on relationships that not even the most empathetic human could give a shit about. I also had a big issue with that. The most mundane, checklist characters you could come up with.The setup was almost the same for the characters in this movie as 2012…..Divorced dad in the dumps, divorced dad trying to reconnect with his son, wife and kids with new husband who ends up dying, government cover ups, dude who knows the real truth but no one listens too, and government guy who stands up to his colleagues. That last part made me LOL actually cause his excuse for stopping the nukes was “my ex wife is up there!”….not a convincing argument lol.I whole heartedly agree about the performances he maybe(?) tried to get out of the cast. Halle Berry spent the majority of the film with “slightly dismayed face”, the lead guy Patrick Wilson, was quite generic and didnt put across his motivations very well and John Bradley was basically Samwell Tarly in 2022. The rest of the cast was even more un memorable since the leads didnt portray a strong enough connection to them. Like I said, everything seemed like some checklist.2012 suffered the same outrageous science and campiness as this movie but it was much more overlooked by me and my fiance because we were more invested in the characters and the destruction.Long rant over. I agree, Moonfall is pretty fucking terrible.
Early in this movie, Bradley’s character phones an observatory in Chile and the guy on the other end is speaking with a Mexican accent. I knew right there what I was in for.It’s hilarious how the information about the moon gets leaked on the Internet and society collapses entirely in the span of two minutes. Not even COVID managed that. This movie is unbelievably stupid.