Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall continues to look like the best/dumbest movie in its second trailer
That's a nice moon you've got there, it would be a shame if it... fell
Film News Moonfall
There’s something truly invigorating about watching a filmmaker operating at the absolute apex of their abilities, putting so much of their heart and soul into a project that you can actually see it uncompromisingly reflected on the screen. We’re talking cinema as art, not as the soulless cog in some mouse’s marketing machine, and it’s hard not to look at that kind of film and feel like you’re looking upon true beauty.
In other words, there’s another trailer for Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall—the movie where the moon falls—and it looks like a god damn blast in the best/worst way. The first teaser, released back in September, was largely plot-free and banked its appeal on the natural escalation of Emmerich’s filmmaking career (he wrecked landmarks, he wrecked cities, he wrecked important historical events, and now he’s wrecking the whole planet AND everyone’s favorite orbiting object).
This new trailer, though, finally digs into the wackadoo plot of the thing, courtesy of Donald Sutherland: It turns out that when man first landed on the moon, the astronauts discovered some kind of… alien thing that lived inside it. Also the moon is an artificial space station. Also the alien things are pissed apparently, and now they’re going to kill the humans and reveal “the dark side of the moon” (as cleverly mentioned in the teaser). Get it? It’s very funny.
Basically, everything you thought you knew about history or science is dumb, and reality is much zanier than anyone thought possible. Imagine Emmerich’s 2012, a movie that seems functionally identical to this one (right down to the “conspiracy people were right” element), but dial it all up a few notches.
Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Michael Peña, and Charlie Plummer also star in the movie, which will hopefully live up to our outlandish expectations and not end up being some kind of boring normal movie. Moonfall will be in theaters on February 4.
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“Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Michael Peña, and Charlie Plummer also star in the movie”This is just the perfect cast for this insanity. You’ve got pure plain oatmeal in human form Patrick Wilson to level the whole thing, Halle Berry to give it some “what did SHE agree to do this?” buzz, and I didn’t realize how much I just wanted to see John Bradley play Sam Tarly in different eras/genres/planetary objects before.
Patrick Wilson: Oatmeal human is the perfect description.
Puddy should happy. Dip is definitely dinner these days.
I definitely ate chips and queso for dinner while I watched the original Ghostbusters at Alamo.
he keeps playing oatmeal BUT HE’S SO TALENTED AHHHH
*Citation Needed
citation provided:
I spent all damn day running around town looking for oatmeal. Winter is coming, and I want my oatmeal! This is the latest weird shortage I’ve seen locally, oatmeal and cornbread mix. I think I may have bought the last two boxes of Quaker’s in town, and I finally found a few bags of generic at Dollar Tree.
Oatmeal, dammit!
Trader Joes?
Where I live, there isn’t a Trader Trader Joe’s within a hundred miles at least.
Dollar Tree Chris Pratt.
I happen to like, but not love, both!So yeah, I guess you’re right.
But he played Orm, the Ocean Master! That was…exciting…?Oatmeal, you got it in one.
Fargo Season Two has him being great and distinct. He doesn’t look distinct, but in the right role, the man is fantastic and memorable.
I was thinking exactly that. He’s funny as hell in that season, but also tremendously sweet.
One of my favorite moments is where he refuses to take credit for his wife finding the key piece of evidence. No one would know, but it’s so obvious that his ego comes second to his love of his wife. Gah, that season is so damn good.
Kieran Culkin was killed in the first episode wasn’t he? Didn’t he go flying thru a windshield? And wasn’t Patrick the younger Ted Danson character?
Angels in America, the TV miniseries. He was fantastic in that.
I always think of that fantastic scene of him in the bathroom with Reagan.
Bruce Campbell really was a perfect cast there too.
You’re right about that.
He’s married to the actress who plays Karolina on Succession. I like him.
He was terrific in The A-Team.
And the more boring version of Night Owl!
Debatable; at least he was a pretty great gadget inventor. Hollis Mason was just a cop, with all the powers of cop minus gun. Dan Dreiberg could have been less-obnoxious Elon Musk, but when he couldn’t be a superhero any more he just sort of quit life. And “can only get it up in costume” is a legit kink. Snyder’s Watchmen was definitely a mixed bag, but Wilson and Jackie Earle Haley were great, and a spin-off series with Nite Owl and Rorschach would have been fantastic.
I am definitely in the camp of “Snyder’s Watchmen was as good a single-movie adaptation as we could get” and have no problem with any of the casting in the non-Gugino category. The HBO series having Dan spitefully giving Laurie a giant blue dildo after they broke up was actually pretty great in giving him more personality even when he wasn’t actually in that show.
Hmm, I didn’t particularly have a problem with Gugino; her old-age makeup was kind of gnarly, but that’s not unusual. I wasn’t fond of Malin Åkerman or Matthew Goode in their parts, although they’ve both done better work elsewhere. (I liked Jean Smart and Jeremy Irons as the older versions of those characters, as well as generally everyone else in the HBO series; interestingly, one of the things that I didn’t like about Goode’s performance in the movie is that he reminded me of Irons at his hammiest and slummingest in some of his less-great movies, although Irons himself wasn’t like that in the series.)
“Orm” sounds like a coastal elite thinking of something to say. Perfect name for living oatmeal.
Know what happens to a moon when it’s struck by lightning?
I wonder what would have happened to Halle Berry’s career if “Catwoman” hadn’t been such a train wreck? If she lucked into the right director and script for that project, she could have turned it into a recurring, iconic role. When I saw her in “John Wick,” I thought: “Oh good, she has a chance to be part of a successful movie for a change.” She deserves a better career than the one she got. Speaking of “Catwoman,” the director was some dude called Pitof – no first name. “Catwoman” was his first feature directorial effort; he never did much as a director after that. Most of his work has been as a visual effects supervisor. Apparently WB was operating on the assumption that it was more important for Catwoman to look good than for the story to make sense.
Hey, how about if we make Catwoman a totally newly-made up character with a stupid name and no connection whatsoever to anything about the original? Fans will love it!
There is only one response to that, EdKed…
Nothing would’ve saved Catwoman anyway but, Berry was woefully miscast. Her early career got a bit siderailed by being stunningly beautiful and Hollywood trying to typecast her into those roles that accentuated that. Berry excels in more earnest, emotionally grounded acting. She was never going to able to vamp it up and reach the absurdities that would’ve made Catwoman at least entertaining. Everyone else in that movie devoured the scenery, realizing how goofy it all was, but it’s just not Berry’s strength. I also wouldn’t say Catwoman completely derailed her career or anything. She’s worked constantly since, in some roles that were brilliant actually, but she has some limitations in her acting.
My greatest Catwoman regret is that Michelle Pfeiffer never played the role a second time. A Tim Burton “Catwoman” with her in the starring role would definitely have been weird but it might have been amazing.
Yeah, Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was the best part of Batman Returns. She navigated vulnerability, seductiveness and fierceness with just the right of amount of campiness inherent in Burton’s Batman. Hathaway’s Catwoman was a disappointment but that wasn’t her fault. That was just a ridiculously overstuffed movie that gave her very little character to work with.
It was the fierceness in Pfeiffer’s performance that I haven’t seen duplicated. Her delivery of the line, “Four … five … STILL ALIVE!” was my single favorite moment in that movie.
I’ve been watching the John Wicke movies with a friend, and we just watched “Parabellum” last night. I’d read that they were good, and that each was better than the last. Which was delightfully true! Going into 3 last night, I thought “How will this be ‘better’? More – uh – great fight scenes?”Oooh – THAT’S how. Gorgeous cinematography! Music! STAR power: Oscar-winner Halle Berry?? and Laurence Fishburne, saying “Sometimes you got to cut a motherfucker??” and…and… ANGELICA HUSTON!??
“Speaking of “Catwoman,” the director was some dude called Pitof – no first name.”
*sigh*
Yeah, most people who go by one name go by their last name.
Wilson has been really good in a lot of stuff now, and I don’t think anyone is questioning why Berry would agree to do it these days. This isn’t the early 2000s.
I’m *kind of* kidding about him being oatmeal… He’s in too good shape to really be plain oatmeal. Maybe more like an Eggo waffle. You know what you’re getting, it’s not *super* exciting, but add some syrup and some other stuff and it’s pretty damn good. He suits a very specific need: A blandly attractive man who will not harm your film in any way. He has a very high floor but a pretty low ceiling. I actually thought he was great as Night Owl and liked him in Little Children, but both those roles kind of required him to be the oatmeal of those worlds.
In his defense Wilson also has an exceptionally beautiful singing voice and he’s a two time Tony nominee.
Seriously? What’s he done?
He started his career in national touring productions of Miss Saigon and Carousel before moving to Broadway where he was nominated for The Fully Monty and Oklahoma. And he’s the only good thing about the dreadful Phantom of the Opera film.I don’t think he done much theater since he’s transitioned to being an actor in films/tv, but he did star in a short revival of Brigadoon a few years ago:
Thanks! I also saw that video that someone posted of him singing Queen, it’s pretty great.
And don’t forget Donald Sutherland to deliver the utterly batshit premise of the movie in a reasoned, soft voice so we believe that, for at least the run time, it’s all real….
And of course Michael Pena, for a dash of likeable wiseass / comic relief.
He plays earnest oatmeal really well though.
No: Here is what happened. Apollo 11 dropped a “probe” Probe breaks moon parts.Moon is giant spaceship that needs to be rebooted. Makes mess, astronauts reboot, save what’s left of humanity. Lots of bwah and screaming. California is destroyed, again.Check for 5 million for script please.
Can someone get me Berry’s plastic surgeon’s number, because they are crushing it.
So who gave Emmerich a copy of Majora’s Mask and a stack of cocaine.
I don’t think anyone has to ‘give’ him the cocaine, he’s got a warehouse full of it.
You don’t get to the top of the industry buying your own cocaine.
Who said he bought it for himself?
But is it the sentient pile of cocaine that co-directed Maximum Overdrive?
Roland wrote Independence Day in under 3 and a half weeks. I’m sure he learned from his previous blockbuster and took five additional minutes on this one. Should be good.
Reminds me of an ancient SNL skit where they’re interviewing Stephen King and he freezes up with writer’s block, convinced he’s finished and washed up, then shakes it off and goes back to pounding on his typewriter.
Honestly feels like that is 3 and quarter weeks to many for that movie.
The behind the scenes events of Independence Day were enough for a movie script.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/independence-day-movie-cast-oral-history-1234976626/
I kinda feel like he completed the film, the first trailer came out in late September, and he was like “Ya, ze film’s okay…ze moon falls, does it not? But it’s not good enough, everyone has seen such things before. BRING ME COCAINE AND PAPERBACK NOVELS! We are doing reshoots, and zis time there will be aliens!”
Or the anime Gurren Lagann, in which the moon is a failsafe device set to crash into the Earth if the human population goes above 1 million. It’s also a spaceship. Now that I think about it, that show is like something that an infinite number of Roland Emmerichs pounding away on an infinite number of typewriters could have churned out.
I hope this ridiculous dud ends his career.
Because Emmerich is gay, I choose to interpret his ridiculous movies as intentional John Waters-style camp with a bigger budget.
I assume we have a plan to just blow up the moon if it starts falling.
Blow it up, then replace it with a new moon made of sphere of old iPhones and laserdiscs.
We can pack it with all our nuclear waste, to give it more heft.
I believe that would give it mass to start falling inward even faster?
We have the technology! Children are our future! We can, must, and will, blow up the moon!
Honestly, I don’t know what we’re waiting for.Find a monkey who doesn’t know sign language and let’s get on with it.
I think we’re pretty much just dead if the moon decides it’s not going to orbit us anymore.
That stayed with me from elementary school. Without the moon’s gravity the earth would rotate two or three times as fast so days would be 8 – 12 hours, the tilt of the earth would not be fixed so the polar caps would melt and the coldest spots on the planet would vary (making fixed agriculture impossible), and the lack of tides would kill off much of the coastal flora. And of course it would be REALLY dark at night.
Nah, we’d be fine. Sea life not so much and we would have a lot of pissed off surfers though
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the moon!
Former astronaut: “I’ve been saying we should do this for years. I’ve walked on the moon, done a pushup on it, ate an egg on it. What else can you do with it?”
i was hoping the moon was gonna fall just because it was tired or something
At least it doesn’t have to wear high heels.
Wasn’t crashing the moon into the earth Ming the Merciless’ plot from the Flash Gordon movie?
Goodnight Moon II: The Revenge
And we have a winner!👏👏👏👏👏😂😂😂😂😂😂
Never Forget
LOL excellent.
Too soon.
You little girls were so preoccupied if whether or not Papa could get you the moon, you didn’t stop to think if you should!!
We should just admit that Emmerich is “insanely overfunded Uwe Boll”.
So… I question the physics here..
This is a Roland Emmerich movie.
Okay, decgeek — that wins the Internet today!
They break out my favorite ridiculous movie slow-mo shot in the teaser, the really heavy object (in this case a semi) bouncing down the road so high our heroes are able to drive under it.
Yeah, Dr. Tyson is going to have a coronary rupture.
Physics? We don’t need no stinking physics!
Shit. If only they’d made it clear that the movie is F-I-C-T-I-O-N.
Someone bet Halle Berry a lot of money to star in a film worse than Catwoman.
Lol, you hate beautiful, successful women so much.
Did they also bet her she couldn’t still fit into the suit?
She was already in X-Men: Last Stand, and The Perfect Stranger, and New Years Eve, and Movie 43 and Kingsmen 2. How many times does she have to win the bet?
Emmerich’s batshit disaster movies are always a blast, I always love them for what they are, and I have no doubt at all this one will continue that pattern. Let fall the moon!
Saw this trailer before Bond. It definitely looks watchable! But the last Independence Day was awful and not fun at all, so I hope we get more of a 2012 vibe in this where it accepts itself as dumb fun. Also the fact that this is set in 2022 just makes it funnier.
I look forward to seeing how an alien intelligence so advanced that it could construct a moon-scale structure and inhabit it for centuries will be taken down by four plucky astronauts piloting a space shuttle. Maybe Jeff Goldblum will show up to inject a computer virus into their systems?
I look forward to learning the, I’m sure completely logical, reason why a super advanced alien intelligence chose to secretly live inside the moon. Or build the moon? Or did they just hollow it out? Either way, I’m sure it will make total sense and not ignore basic science at all.
It’s because they can jump higher on the moon. It makes them more advanced.
Omg YES!!!!!!!!
Did you tell them about the spelling?
“Either way, I’m sure it will make total sense and not ignore basic science at all.”
Well, it’s a good thing this is a fucking science fucking fiction fucking movie, isn’t it?
Jesus fucking Christ, it’s like words don’t mean anything to you dumbshits.
I’m hoping whatever happens is canon in the Smashing Pumpkins “Tonight, Tonight” mooniverse but NOT the Meles “Trip to the Moon” film that inspired it.
Or date it’s much younger alien daughter?
But it’s got Michael Pena, so it’s 3 plucky astronauts in a space shuttle, and Luis in a van that can shrink to the size of a Hotwheels
Maybe Jeff Goldblum will show up to inject a computer virus into their systems?
They couldn’t afford him and Donald Sutherland, too.Cool idea, though….
Goldblum doesn’t take Emmerich’s calls anymore after ID4 2
Good point, Nilus — and who can blame him?
Pretty sure we’ll find out that it’s not aliens, but whalers.
Quick! Find a serial port!
Haha. You know the fake Moon will burn up when it meets Earth’s atmosphere. The only non-burnt bits will land on world landmarks.
There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact it’s all dark.
The alien creature looks like a sentient swarm of nanotechnology. So maybe the moon was built from the same tech and turns alive itself.Donald Sutherland is wrong: there have been five mass exinctions in the past and we’re currently going through what many reputable scientists call a sixth, created by man’s wrecking the planet. But maybe saying that in a movie would alienate half the audience and distract from a crazy sci-fi disaster movie. Speaking of falling moon stories, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves would make a good movie.
“Donald Sutherland is wrong: there have been five mass exinctions in the past and we’re currently going through what many reputable scientists call a sixth, created by man’s wrecking the planet.”
So, he’s right, because this is a movie and not the real world.
Lol. Evacuate the west coast? Uh, just evacuate all coasts, and all of the southern pacific archipelago… basically anywhere within a couple hundred miles of the ocean… because if the moon got that close to earth the ocean’s tidal bulge would swamp it all daily. The moons gravity would also buckle the earth’s crust causing massive earthquakes and volcanic activity while fairly quickly slowing the earth’s rotation, possibly to a halt. If the moon was as close to the earth as suggested by how much of the horizon it took up in that one shot, all life would likely be wiped out. I expect there will be some sort of ‘the aliens can control the moon’s mass’ hand waving though. Or maybe not and I’m just way overthinking an Emmerich disaster movie… which, yeah, it’s that.
Dude, smoke a bowl. Everything’s good.
Just did lol. That’s what made me think about the physics of it.
So, this is where the Moon is a giant egg, right?
This sounds like that cursed Doctor Who episode where the moon is actually a giant space monster egg, there’s a very tortured abortion analogy, and then the egg hatches and the baby immediately lays a new egg the exact same size. I expect a similar respect for basic logic and laws of physics.
Alasdair Wilkins gave that episode an ‘A’
https://www.avclub.com/doctor-who-kill-the-moon-1798181494I like Alasdair but cursed indeed.
And the thing is, it doesn’t just play this all seriously. It plays this all deathly, grimly seriously, with agonising second-guessing over complex moral quandaries, searing condemnations of the darkness at the heart of humanity and brutal our-friendship-is-dead fights between the main characters, as if it’s utterly unthinkable to the writers that anyone could possibly find a story which hinges on the moon being a giant egg a bit ridiculous.
This looks dumber than Iron Sky’s Moon Nazi’s. And that’s saying something.
We went back to space shuttles? Did we solve the energy crisis or something and NASA has a billion dollars in surplus? Also, I’m going to watch this movie because it’s good goofy fun and I am tired of thinking.
If you want goofy fun involving space shuttles and the moon, have I got the film for you!Did I also mention it stars Walter Koening and Bruce Campbell?
Your average American probably doesn’t even know NASA stopped using space shuttles. The things are kinda iconic, so I give them a pass on this one. As long as they don’t say Bezos or Musk built it, I am happy
The cost savings and not having to rely in Russia is the best part.
To be fair*, they did have a shot where they are hauling a Space Shuttle down a street on a flatbed truck so presumably they refurbished an old one fomra museum.*: There is no reason to be fair to this movie.
Fuck fair. And Liz Phair. And County Fairs. And Fine Fare. LOL!
This production somehow got handed one of NASA’s real shuttle flight deck simulators to use as a set, so prepare for authentic buttons and switches to go with the crazy. It was donated to Pima Air and Space after filming earlier this year, they finally got it on display recently but haven’t been super enthused about advertising the “upcoming unspecified sci fi film” it came from, lol
I really need a movie about Donald Sutherland and how he knows all the secrets.
Roughly as credible.
And then the moon comes crashing into the Earth, and whattya gonna do then? It’s called Two Brothers, it’s just called Two Brothers.
I can’t help but feel I’ve seen this somewhere before … as if it was in my distant past somewhere …
I admire you’re courage —not many people are willing to admit to having watched that film.
The moon is an egg
Posting all the worst Twitter takes
Roland Emmerich might as well have access to my bank account. If he has a movie in theaters, I will be going there to see it. They may be dumb, but nobody does big-screen spectacle like he does.
I even defend Godzilla for how much b movie it is, how much a love letter to b movie making it is. The key scene, for me, is when Godzilla is not shown, just a sound effect as if it was walking around, and what Emmerich shows is people doing small jumps on the concrete. Like very obviously jumping.
So this is apparently a sequel to the first season finale of Transformers: Beast Wars (in which prehistoric Earth had TWO moons and the aliens who created it got pissed off at the Maximals and Predacons for fucking up their experiment and activated one of them to turn it into a weapon that would scour all life from the planet’s surface.)
I know this is a very small thing, considering everything else in the trailer, but did that trailer say there’s a governor of the entire West Coast?
No. The quote was “The governor has ordered the evacuation of the entire West Coast”. It didn’t say that said governor technically was in charge of all of it. One suspects that this was the governor of California, which does govern the majority of the US West Coast, but I suppose it could be the governor of Rhode Island just looking out for people on the other coast, I suppose.
Gavin Newsom has a big ego, but I don’t think even he thinks he can order the evacuations of the coasts of Oregon and Washington.
Listen, when the moon starts attacking, borders break down quick
That was so incredibly dumb that I’m angry at myself because I know I will be watching it.
Back when this movie first got announced but before we knew anything about it I thought this was going to be a Seveneves rip off. I could not have been more wrong about the direction this was going to go.
I am assuming this syncs up to Dark Side of the Moon and is also best watched high as hell
How did they get financing for this ridiculous story? Is a so-called Chinese studio involved? Is China the only country not affected by the disasters? What a load of crap.