Moonfall (2022)
(Amazon Streaming, April 2022) Roland Emmerich has been making disaster movie for longer than some of Moonfall’s audience has been alive, but he’s not necessarily getting better at it. Sure, the special effects are much improved, but what’s their use when they can’t patch a terrible script, a disappointing structure and atrocious dialogue? For my money, Emmerich peaked during the first two thirds of 2012 – about as good a blend of spectacle and enjoyable nonsense as he’s able to orchestrate, with better special effects than Independence Day and Godzilla, and a better script (relatively speaking) than Geostorm or Moonfall. This time around, the moon is behaving mysteriously and drawing ever close to Earth – the only hope for humanity being a mission with a hastily recommissioned Space Shuttle. A usual, Emmerich disaster films get worse the longer they’re not spectacles – you get the usual crew of disgraced professionals, conspiracy crackpots who happen to be right (the sooner we can get rid of that trope, the better) and divorced characters. There is a long and not-completely interesting essay to be written about disaster movies and script structure (as in: the disaster film was born the moment screenwriters understood that you could stretch the thrills over an entire film rather than have it at the beginning of the third act) and Moonfall doesn’t quite know how to get that right: The opening half of the film is duller than expected, with some subplots that are mind-numbingly rote or useless (including Kelly Yu in a redundant role solely fit to affirm the film’s Chinese production money). While the disaster itself has its moments, you can see the energy running out of it fast enough to justify the film’s third-act slide into pure undiluted science fiction with two alien races battling it out inside Earth’s “moon.” There are, to be fair, some good showpieces – sure, you’ve seen plenty of rocket launches in other movies, but what about a shuttle launch from underwater? But at other times, the script becomes obnoxious-to-irritating – the Elon Musk worship was a bad idea from the get-go, and is only going to become even more troublesome. Even the last-third slide into pure SF – which I should like – is hampered by ham-fisted exposition and a refusal to explore some of these possibilities. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve read plenty of SF novels taking a far more grounded look at the moon exploding (McDevitt’s Moonfall and Baxter’s Moonseed, among many others) and this feels like a pale, preposterous copy of that. Emmerich can still be depended on for short bursts of excitement and trailer-worthy shots, but I think it’s time to let go of the hope that he’ll ever be able to rope it all again into a satisfying film.