Film review: Moonfall

Hello readers! This week I suffered through another sub-par sci-fi blockbuster: Moonfall (2022). This is yet another disaster film served up by Roland Emmerich, and it’s very similar to his previous offerings (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), except somehow worse. Is it worth watching? That’s hard to say.

Personally, I enjoyed Moonfall – but for all the wrong reasons. The film sits awkwardly on the fence between “it’s so bad it’s good” and “it’s just bad”, which leaves us, the viewers, in a difficult conundrum. For the most part, the film is a hate-watch, where most of the enjoyment stems from mocking its deficiencies. However, when the film occasionally presents fleeting hints of something cool or thought-provoking, you feel ashamed for daring to appreciate it – especially when it trashes all semblance of artistic integrity two seconds later.

A brief synopsis for the blissfully ignorant

The so-called plot of Moonfall is summarised by the title, which is probably all you need to know before watching it. In fact, I suspect my enjoyment was enhanced by my indifference, as I couldn’t even summon up the curiosity to Google this film before it started. It turns out that there is a sinister force causing the Moon to fall – and it is so far beyond ridiculous that it would take faster-than-light travel to reach the same level of lunacy.

At the start of the film, a group of astronauts are attacked by a cloud of sentient metal bits, leaving one of them dead, one of them unconscious, and one of them wide awake to witness the carnage. On returning to Earth, NASA fires that one witness and starts a massive cover-up. With this, we see the birth of a classic disaster movie protagonist: the misunderstood maverick. He rapidly evolves into his final form by divorcing his tropey wife, who even takes the goddam kids. For plot convenience, the ex-tropey wife becomes a big cheese at NASA, and the son ends up sentenced with jail time due to dangerous driving under the influence of daddy issues. So far, so standard. It’s also worth mentioning that the son is called Sonny. It’s a good indicator of the levels of ingenuity present within this masterpiece.

The other protagonist in our classic Emmerich ensemble is a quirky Mancunian who has been secretly monitoring the Moon’s orbit. For unexplained reasons, he believes that the Moon is an artificial megastructure, and he’s looking for evidence to prove himself right. When the Moon starts falling, he spreads the news online and the world descends into chaos. Quite why anyone believes him is never explained.

Finally acknowledging the Moon’s unwanted advances, the big cheese decides to investigate and finds herself in a dingy cellar beneath NASA. Here, Donald Sutherland materialises for just long enough to explain that NASA has been covering up the truth for decades: that there are aliens inside the Moon. With this two-minute revelation complete, he trundles back into the shadows on his mobility scooter, never to be seen again.

The film then jumps through the traditional disaster movie hoops, with the Moon’s approach wreaking havoc across the Earth, but on California in particular. There are huge tidal waves, massive earthquakes, unexpected volcanic eruptions, and gravitational anomalies that hoover water out of the ocean and suck the atmosphere into space. Our cast of characterless side characters (who comprise the stepfamilies of the maverick and the big cheese), are forced to flee various disasters, just so we can be subjected to various apocalyptic spectacles.

But what about the main plot? As always, the nukes are rolled out in the first act, but our protagonists are sure there must be some other way to save the world – because there always is in these types of films. They end up using an old space shuttle to get into orbit, having had some billion-dollar rockets just lying around for a rainy day. Eventually, the maverick, the cheese and the conspiracy theorist end up following the swarm of sentient metal bits into the Moon’s interior, and it is here that the film starts to derail in the most spectacular way.

Some general gripes

My biggest problem is that none of the dialogue in Moonfall sounds human. All speech is delivered in quips or one-liners, but these don’t follow a logical conversational structure. The quips don’t build on one another, and the lack of genuine exchange of ideas between characters leaves them feeling disconnected and inhuman. We only understand their individual motivations because we’ve seen them portrayed in Emmerich films so many times before.

Besides dehumanising the characters, endless one-liners detract from the plot, which was thin to begin with. There is a constant battle unfolding on-screen, between the writers straining to be funny, and the writers struggling to create suspense. For example, upon being invited to come to space and save the world, the conspiracy theorist exclaims “I have IBS!” – presumably because nothing translates better to lucrative international audiences than a fat man poop joke. Quips come first, quality comes second.

Moonfall also suffers the classic problem of suspense by stupidity. Many conundrums faced by the characters are caused by foolish decisions rather than by the disaster itself – and most of these bad decisions are never explored. For example, NASA decide to launch the world-saving rocket from a place beside the coast, clearly vulnerable to Moon-induced tidal waves. As such, the rocket ends up launching just seconds before it would have been submerged. I view this as the opposite of plot-armour: placing characters in easily avoidable predicaments, just to snatch them out of harm’s way at the last moment. It’s cheap. Too cheap for a multi-million dollar budget film.

Another gripe? The product placement. It is blatant to the point of parody, with an entire story arc set up so that the only car to survive the apocalypse is a Lexus. There are also multiple flattering references to Elon Musk throughout the film, and I can’t work out if he paid for them to be there, or whether Emmerich is a genuine Musk fan. At one point, the conspiracy theorist asks, “what would Elon do?” – then goes on to solve the problem in what was presumably such a genius way that the script writers couldn’t even describe it.

Finally, the tried-and-tested “conspiracy theorist was right all along” trope comes back in full force (we’ll get to the details in a minute). However, it feels more malevolent than on previous outings. Such characters serve to undermine the experts; for example, while NASA are portrayed as being duplicitous and ineffective, the conspiracy theorist is shown to be an honest genius. Perhaps, in an era where genuine conspiracies are gaining ground and causing serious damage, the romanticising of crackpots has lost its charm. Or perhaps I am merely upset that the conspiracy theorist has a cat named Fuzz Aldrin. I mean. Fuzz Aldrin. It wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t the most believable character in the film…

Act three: The glorious derailment

At the beginning of the final act, our hapless characters follow the cloud of sentient metal bits inside the Moon, and this is when things start to get wild in the most unimaginative way imaginable. The Moon is revealed to be an artificial megastructure, hollow on the inside of its rocky shell. Our conspiracy theorist, who has suspected this all along for unknown reasons, announces that it is a Dyson sphere: a structure encircling a star in order to capture its energy more effectively. Why? How? Don’t worry, the Moon is here to explain.

The maverick wakes up in a white, echoing void – one that has been visited so many times in so many films that I’m amazed it’s still so pristine. The Moon introduces itself (yes) as an AI (you heard me) and speaks to him through the voice of his son, Sonny (we’ve reached a new level of storytelling) to explain that it was built by the ancestors of humanity on a distant, technologically advanced planet. There are actually some seeds of a good idea here, but as always, they wither in the drought of originality. We are treated to ten minutes of exposition, narrated by a six year old doing their best robot voice.

It turns out that the humancestors had perfect lives free from war and famine etc., and they all wore white because colours were so yesterday and stains didn’t exist yet. This idyllic, beige existence was made possible by AI, which aided them in every aspect of their life. That is, until the fateful day when it turned EVIL. Clouds of metal rose out of the beside lamps (and, we are left to assume, other household objects), and then they devoured the humancestors in an unspecified but presumably gruesome way. As such, the humans built a Dyson sphere and sent it off into the void, aiming to restart life on another planet.

What?

There are too many problems to discuss in a closing paragraph, so let’s just deal with the worst offenders.

Firstly, I don’t have a problem with Dyson spheres – but I do have a problem with the Moon containing a white dwarf star. White dwarfs have a minimum radius of around 5571 km, far greater than the 1737 km radius of the Moon. The star presented to us in Moonfall is only a few hundred metres across, but this isn’t even the most irritating inaccuracy. A white dwarf has a mass roughly equal to the sun. Are we meant to believe that this is orbiting our planet, despite being 330,000 times heavier? No. Just no. Okay, so the Moon might have some sort of technology that keeps it in orbit, which the evil AI is damaging and causing it to fall, but no. Sorry. No. I’m putting my foot down no matter how hard the Moon gravity tries to stop me.

Oh, and while I’m dealing with the scientific accuracy of this film: the tidal waves? The earthquakes? The volcanic eruptions? The atmosphere being sucked away? I can’t be bothered to do the maths to verify it, and neither could the writers. Just go by the Mario Galaxy rulebook. Give up. Have fun.

In summary

Moonfall is a disaster film that isn’t meant to be taken seriously. In fact, the best way to enjoy it is to ridicule it at every opportunity, which makes me question the extent to which the script is self-aware. Give it a few years, and the plot lines of these films will gain sentience and turn evil, and then where will we be? Paradoxically enough, it feels as if the script has been written by an AI – and if this is the case, it has already learnt to hate itself. Perhaps we should all be very afraid.

Finally: some product placement of my own

One of my greatest fears when watching terrible science fiction films is that I will notice a trope that I have used myself. Luckily, Moonfall steered just clear of this overlap – but without giving too many spoilers, it had me nervous for a moment or two. If you’re in the mood for some sci-fi with natural disasters and government conspiracies, you can check out my Starlit Ship series on Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Starlit-Ship/dp/B08YWN2NXB). Apologies for the shameless advertising. You understand how it is in this modern capitalist hellscape.