My first 2022 movie viewing is so light I felt like I could have floated out of my theater seat.  Popcorn movies are fun; this one is pure bubblegum, and I just shake my head seeing that Roland Emmerich was able to procure $150 million to fund this project.  I try to not equate money and film but it is a business and in this case I cannot help but wonder what the producers saw in this ridiculous material to make them think it could be a blockbuster.  Granted, Emmerich and his team have hit it big before, and most of their films are at least creditable.  This one, not so much.

Roland Emmerich’s film begins with an incident in Earth orbit, one which costs an astronaut his life and grounds the two others who were present.  More than a decade later, the Moon begins to fall out of its orbit, toward the Earth, and those two former astronauts are called upon to save the day.  Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) is now a NASA executive, and she takes control when her boss literally walks away from his job.  Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) was disgraced when no one believed his story — despite video evidence — but he is distracted by personal failure and family issues.  That’s when crackpot scientist KC Houseman (John Bradley) steps in, spills the beans to the public about the Moon menace and prods the others into action.  A whole lot more happens, all of it increasingly silly and hard to believe, until the world is nearly wiped out forever.

I’ll give Emmerich and his team credit for thinking big; eventually this plot involves multiple forms of alien intelligence, a revised human historical record, a retired Space Shuttle pressed back into service and destruction on an apocalyptic level.  It’s like Crack in the World meets the 2009 TV miniseries Impact (which I just happened to watch last week!), with all sorts of other sci-fi references thrown in for nostalgia’s sake.  On some level it’s kind of fun, but I really enjoy this type of cinematic mayhem, and I was just shaking my head watching it all unfold. What it needs is a script that doesn’t fall into stereotypes, tropes and intercutting astronauts trying to kill the alien AI on the Moon while their families are slogging through the Colorado snow trying to find shelter as meteorites blast the landscape around them.  What it needs is a script that should have seen at least two more drafts.  Probably more.

As much as I like this kind of movie, I cannot possibly recommend Moonfall, and my two star rating is probably quite generous.  It is impossible to take seriously as the plot hits every obvious pivot point and cliché one can imagine, from the military dudes assuring the president that they can safely nuke the Moon to the redemption stories that every major character faces along the way.  Some creativity is evident as the story moves into utter fantasy, but I prefer science fiction with some basic relation to the world we actually reside in.  In movies three people can evidently save the planet (given alien help, of course), but I don’t buy it at all.  ☆ ☆.  28 February 2022.