The moon falls in this delightfully wild teaser for Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall
Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, and John Bradley have met with a terrible fate, haven't they?
Film News Moonfall
Roland Emmerich blew up our most treasured landmarks in Independence Day, froze our greatest cities in The Day After Tomorrow, and trashed the whole planet in 2012, and now… he’s coming for the dang moon. Or, rather, the dang moon is coming for us in this teaser for his latest ridiculously over-the-top disaster film Moonfall, which is almost literally the tagline used in this trailer. In case it’s not clear: This looks like some fantastically dumb nonsense, with a number of famous actors looking up in awe as, well, the moon falls. Those famous actors include Halle Berry, rightful Westeros king John Bradley, Patrick Wilson (taking a rare break from busting ghosts), Michael Peña, Kelly Yu, Charlie Plummer, and Donald Sutherland.
Plot-wise, this teaser doesn’t offer many details, but the description on the YouTube page says a “mysterious force” has knocked the moon out of orbit and sent it “hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it.” (Did Emmerich write the YouTube description? That’s a good line.) Berry is playing a NASA executive and former astronaut who thinks she knows how to save the world, but only a conspiracy theorist (Bradley) and one of her astronaut buddies (Wilson) believe her. From there, it sounds like the three of them will go into space and discover that “our moon is not what we think it is.” If that wasn’t a big enough hint, there seems to be some weird alien stuff happening in this trailer as well, so we’re going to go out on a limb and guess that the moon is some kind of alien egg like in that Doctor Who episode, and whatever lives inside it is mad about all of our flagpoles and footprints and whatever other stuff we’ve been leaving there since the ‘60s.
Anyway, Moonfall will finally be in theaters on February 4, 2022. (We know we just learned about this movie today, but we say “finally” because we really want to see it now.)
109 Comments
I’m glad Emmerich read Seveneves and realized it’d be a pretty fucking boring movie (great book, though!) and decided to do his own thing.
Supposedly Ron Howard is working on a Seveneves adaptation, and also what the hell do you mean it would be boring? It would be amazing, although certainly I’d agree that it would be better suited to an eight-episode prestige TV adapation than to a two-hour movie.
Seveneves could make for a pretty great limited series if:1) it really focuses on building up rich characters and making us care about them2) preserves the sense of impending, inevitable doom3) keeps the narrative shift secret (obviously if you’ve read it you know what happens)4) makes the latter part of the story interesting, because the last third of that book is boring as fuck and is among the worst offenders in Stephenson’s history of dud endings
Stephenson is one of my favorite authors, but I think he’s kind of run out of things to say because his last few books have been unfocused and meandering. Fall was an interesting premise but spent so much of its time following a bunch of characters I hadn’t managed to care about on a quest I didn’t care about. I also had logistical problems with how the world economy would still support an increasing number of endless afterlife simulations. He seemed to rely on the notion of AIs making infinite amounts of money via stock trading.I think he’s gotten to a point where he’s really interested in certain technological or sociological concepts, but short-changes characters in service of exploring those ideas. It reminds me, oddly, of the MMO Star Wars Galaxies, which wasn’t so much a game as an economics simulator with some combat elements tacked on: the guy in charge of it, Raph Koster, turned out to be way more interested in creating intricate systems than in making those systems fun.
I’d enjoy Seveneves a lot more if the last third of the book had much character development and, well, story as the first two thirds. Instead Stephenson just went “well, here’s a book…and also an excruciatingly detailed overview of my homebrew tabletop RPG world.”
I’ve never read the book, but I read the Wikipedia entry, and I kept having to check to make sure I hadn’t accidentally clicked the link to the video game based on it. The film should have resource counters at the bottom of the screen.
I never did read Fall though I imagine I will eventually. He’s got a new one coming out in November I think called Termination Shock that kind of sounds like what you’re describing in your last paragraph. I will love Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon forever so I’ll always have a little optimism, but I agree the last few have drifted away from actual ‘literature’.
Honestly, I just got bored after the Hard Rain, which was the best writing I’ve seen from Stephenson since Snow Crash.
The biggest problem with the last third of that book is that it wasn’t a standalone novel after at least a couple other books showing how it got that way. That part of the story was a bratwurst. We wanted to see the sausage get made.
Depressing as hell of a book. At least until the last section, which I got bored and skipped most of.
It looks like it may be based on the Jack McDevitt book with same name.
Never watched Doctor Who but the moon as an egg thing is something I’ve thought of, too, when I was way younger.
I’m a sucker for Roland Emmerich disaster movies no matter how dumb they are, and this looks to be super-dumb, so I’m into it.
The plot doesn’t look to be much like it, but did anyone ever figure out if this is an actual adaptation of the Jack McDevitt book “Moonfall”, or whether there’s going to be a fun lawsuit soon?
I imagine the lawyers have already talked and reached an agreement. I’d never heard of it, but it was a successful enough book to have its own Wikipedia entry, so there’s no way the filmmakers weren’t aware of it.
Looks like it might be fun. It has to be better than Independence Day 2. Right?
Does it, though?
I try my best to be an optimist. You are not helping.
I tried so hard, I just could not be bothered to finish that movie. What a terrible waste of a movie.
At least this movie promises to deliver on its title, unlike that piece of crap Skyfall.
And the most egregious example, “Legends of the Fall.”
Or that movie “The Fall”, where you wait two hours for someone to trip, but nobody ever does.
Or Peter Greenaway’s The Falls, which shows even fewer people falling down.
See, this is why I like “The Man Who Fell To Earth” so much. Accuracy, above all else.
Or Mulholland Falls. Yes, SOMEONE falls, but it’s not the road. And Free Fall, which I had to pay for.
Misnomer. The English title was actually Skyautumn
I was let down in The Constant Gardener.
The Naked Lunch…
I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.
“I watched that damn movie you recommended, knowing how you do what an enthusiastic fan I am of both dogs and reservoirs, and yet, as the credits rolled, found myself furious, enraged at having witnessed neither.”
“I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.”—Nelson Muntz, after watching Naked Lunch.
I mean, this feels like a parody. Like something that would appear as a movie-within-a-movie in “Tropic Thunder” or something.
Looks like the Roland Emmerich Shit Gets Fucked Up In The Biggest Way Cinematic Universe is back on track, and will culminate in his magnum opus, Everything Go Boom, And You’d Best Believe I Do Mean Everything.
Looks like Moon’s been working out, getting swole for it’s big cinematic outing. That, or nobody working on the film bothered to look up the proper scale of the Earth and Moon.
The moon knows how to work its camera angles, okay?
It’s closer to the correct proportion than you might think (closer than I thought anyway). The moon’s diameter is 27.3% of Earth’s, the header image shows it as an even 30%. Of course, to get a view like this where the Earth is in front but the perspective hasn’t drastically foreshortened the size of the moon, you’d have to be viewing from quite a distance relative to the distance between the objects (though I guess that distance is a big plot point of the film…).
I appreciate you 🙂
OBJECTION! the difference must be even bigger with perspective, and it already implies a 37% increase in mass! I just jest, really cool graphic.
I guess the internet was right to hate the moon after all.
Good news!
Seriously dude? We’re earthlings, let’s blow up earth things.
http://www.tzr.io/yarn-clip/58679db1-d9ad-4917-b7fb-68b6401b48bd/gif
I’m pretty sure the fucking moon crashing into the earth would effectively sterilize all life, so this doesn’t like a disaster movie so much as a “make peace with the impending world-ending apocalypse” movie.
Pretty sure that it’s going to be a “Moon orbits around planet at an altitude just above the atmosphere for a dramatically-convenient amount of time” movie instead of a “moon crashes into earth” movie, considering there are people who “know how to stop it”.
Armageddon instead of Deep Impact, essentially.
Yeah, even having the moon temporarily dip into the atmosphere is still gonna be enough to like, rip of most of the atmosphere and set the entire surface of the planet on fire, while also sloshing the oceans around in the most incredible tsunamis ever, leaving the surface of the Earth lifeless, scorched, drowned, or all of the above.So this movie will probably both ignore all of that and have some alien bullshit save the day.
Life is pretty hearty. Single-celled organisms could be fine. Maybe we’ll get moonfall 2: the re-evolution of man
Moonfall 2: Multicellular Re-evolution Boogaloo
I figured this was just the what they think the moon wobble is gonna be
And then the moon comes crashing into the Earth, and whattya gonna do then?
I’m sure they’ll have some convenient way to survive like the movie Greenland lol
If its based on the 1998 Jack McDevitt book the entire moon doesn’t hit the planet. An unknown interstellar comet hits the moon and shatters it. Most of the debris remains in orbit but some larger chunks head toward earth. The break up of the moon causes lots of problems on earth like tsunamis, because there is always a tsunami, and there is one big chunk that threatens to destroy the US and lots of people do lots of shit to make sure it doesn’t happen.
That book was fun enough for what it was, and I really enjoy that later Neal Stephenson came along and said “you idiot, here’s what would actually happen if the Moon shattered, and it’s not a pretty picture.”
Yes, this is one of those things that isn’t worth worrying about. Like the Yellowstone Supervolcano blowing tomorrow.
The problem with Yellowstone is that outside a certain radius it won’t kill you instantly, you’ll have to wait a few days for the ash to smother everything, then slowly starve/freeze to death, depending on your location.But in terms of how to stop it if it decides to blow, yep definitely not worth worrying about that…
I’m in Chicago which I think is well within the radius of “well fucked, really fast.”
Chicago suburbs here, and from the estimates I’ve seen about that from time to time, we’re in the perfectly awful spot between “not instant death” and “but still no fucking prayer of making it more than a day or two, during which time you will immensely suffer.” So that’s great.Otherwise, we’re in a pretty good spot in terms of surviving the upcoming age of disasters. Climate change will be manageable, and we’re in the Saudi Arabia of fresh water. So of course Yellowstone’s going to ruin that for us.
Yup. Whenever I hear about “water wars,” I take a walk by 20% of the world’s fresh water supply. Suck it, Southern California.
Whenever my family or friends in the Bay Area have chimed in over the years with comments like “it’s sunny and 70 here” when I’ve complained about it being twenty below or whatever, my immediate rejoinder has been water-related. If they do it again this year I’ll throw in something about not being on fire all the time.
Google “Roche limit”. When the Moon gets closer than about 9500km, Earth’s gravity rips it into pieces and we get a set of rings……which then proceed to pummel us with debris for the next few million years so your end result here in the same.
If you haven’t read Seveneves, now’s the time if you’re into hearing more about that.
For anyone whose interest in this movie is piqued after watching this trailer, please allow me to remind you that this movie is brought to you by the same man responsible for 1998’s all time hall of fame cinematic turdburger-Godzilla
Possibly the worst movie ever
Have you ever seen Ace Ventura Jr.: Pet Detective? Well, I have, and I can testify that it set the bar very low.
The only movie I ever saw in a theater where I actually considered asking for my money back…and I’ve seen some real turds.
I’m a disciple of “no talking in a movie theater” to the point where I get physically angry when people do it, but when I saw Godzilla I was shouting at the screen and getting more laughs than the movie itself.
Maybe it’ll be like Gurren Lagann and we’ll learn that the moon has actually been a giant spaceship the whole time and then it ends with Halle Berry & co. taking off on a space adventure.
They’re going to kidnap Halle Berry.
“I just pull this lever and I’m all ‘Goodnight . . . Moon’!”
Seeing as how Roland Emmerich is writerproducerdirector, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that scientific accuracy is one of the paramount concerns.
More Tugg Speedman nonsense from our dear Mssr. Emmerich.
Because I’m weird, I used to have a reoccurring dream about the moon falling out of the sky. Suffice it to say, this film looks just as silly as my dream. I’m up for it.
Didn’t the world learn anything from 2012 and John Cusack “Dukes of Hazzard” jumping a limo into a cargo plane? Because they didn’t learn the lessons from “Day After Tomorrow,” i.e. he makes shitty movies.Godzilla was actually not bad when viewed in relation to everything he’s made since.
Roland is gay, so I choose to interpret his movies as intentional camp
Stonewall, though…?
How does that explain Baz Luhrmann?
yeah but he made con air, so we can forgive a lot
I thought he promised he was done after that one. He promised!
Ugh I hate it when this happens!
This trailer sucksWhy isn’t there a deep voices trailer guy saying “ON FEBUARY 4th, THE WHOLE WORLD IS GETTING MOONED!”
I just want to see the moon chase a fighter jet through the grand canyon and then get punched in the face.
Shh! No spoilers!
But-but the moon is actually drifting – oh fuck it. Wooo! A new movie!
a “mysterious force” has knocked the moon out of orbit and sent it “hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it.”Deja Q, anyone?
No “That’s no moon” joke? Seriously? Oh c’mon!
“That’s no moon! It’s a….oh…nope, I guess it is the moon. My bad!”
That’s a god-tier subhead, well played
We could use a time-traveling, heroic fairy boy in green garb with a sassy fairy right about now. Oh, you mean for this movie?
If Louie Gomert and the GOP aren’t the villains of this movie, I ain’t watching it.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2021/jun/09/republican-congressman-suggests-changing-moons-orbit-to-fight-climate-change-video
There definitely will be that politician who covers up the impending moon-crash because money
I SAID GOODNIGHT MOON!
I’m a Flatmooner, so I find this movie offensive.
i see your majora’s mask reference, subhead writer, and i respect it
This is so unbelievably stupid. I can’t wait
How do the moon Nazis factor into this
Just trigger the nuclear waste stockpile on the Moon to cause a massive explosion that will push it out into space like what happened with the original Moon back in 1999.
Ah, but does it have a scene of a guy shooting a minigun at Jupiter while screaming “Screw you!” like in The Wandering Earth?
Does B-19-7 AKA Floyd the multiple purpose robot make an appearance?
Moon is a giant alien egg? DEADSPACE MOVIE CONFIRMED!
I think Neal Stephenson’s “Seveneves” novel did this so well and went into such detail on the science side (as he does) that I can’t imagine suspending my disbelief through even this trailer.
I found some exclusive footage!
Was stuff falling upward around that car because the moon’s gravity is so much more than the earth’s?
SO much more!
I wish this were going to be a Moonseed adaptation…
I guess Commander Koenig finally returned the moon, but kind of screwed up the parking job …
Space: 2022
C.S. Lewis Jr. was right!
Can we retire the “conspiracy nerd who was right all along” trope now? It just hits differently these days.
“our moon is not what we think it is.”
Everybody thought it was Stilton but it turned out to be Wensleydale.
I wouldn’t mind a score full of “moon” songs. Especially hoping to hear Bing Crosby’s “Moonlight Becomes You” at some moment of overwhelming danger.
This will hold me over until the Wandering Earth sequel.