Movie Reaction: Moonfall

Formula: Independence Day – charisma

 

What do you do when you have a Woody Allen-esque compulsion to keep making movies but your movies can’t be made on a Woody Allen budget? That’s the question for this phase of Rolland Emmerich’s career. He made his name on big budget disaster movies. Many of them I really like (Independence Day, The Patriot). Others I enjoy for what they are (White House Down, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012). Moonfall looks like it might be a breaking point for him. It’s a $140 million movie that probably needed $200 million to do it right and has the cast of a $40 million movie.

 

You know the drill as far as the plot goes. It’s the end of the world. This time, it’s the moon going off course because of alien technology. Patrick Wilson is a disgraced astronaut who is the only one with the skills to stop the moon from colliding with Earth. Halle Berry plays the director of NASA and former friend of Wilson’s who is the only one in the agency who hasn’t given up. John Bradley is an amateur astrophysicist who was the first one to predict that aliens controlled the moon. There are a bunch of other satellite family members who you’ll recognize as types from any Emmerich movie. You may notice that I just breezed by the fact that aliens control the moon. The movie does that too. It turns out, there’s no easy way to write about the moon colliding with Earth in a way that can be stopped, so they have to make a lot of leaps to make it work.

 

While there are bits of movies like Contact in this, the best comparison for Moonfall is Independence Day, which is a terribly cheesy movie that I would die for. There are a few things that ID4 has and Moonfall doesn’t that makes all the difference. The first is the cast balance. ID4 is perfect in this regard. Will Smith brings the charisma. Jeff Goldblum is the straight man, but because he’s Goldblum, he can’t help but bring eccentricity to it. Judd Hirsch is there commenting on how crazy all of it is. Bill Pullman plays everything straight and with incredible conviction. There’s no way his speech should work at the end, but it does. You even have Randy Quaid for laughs until he becomes the emotional core of the movie.

 

Moonfall doesn’t have that. It has Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry both filling the straight man role. Each tamps down their charisma. John Bradley seems like he’d be the joke guy, but he’s really not. So, you have the three heroes all filling the same role. No one is having fun with anything. No one is commenting on how nuts it all is. No one is bad. They just have no variety.

 

Second, there’s too much disaster going on. ID4 is built around two big set pieces. There’s the destruction of the White House (and other locations) in that famous scene and there’s the big fight at the end. These are huge scenes that work in contrast with the tension building the rest of the time. Moonfall gets big and stays big. The streets of Los Angeles are flooded by the rising tides. Pieces of the Moon are crashing to Earth. Gravity is going in and out. Because it’s so big and so much, Emmerich has to rely on a lot of special effects, and they don’t all look great. A lot of this movie looks fake. Even stuff that I’m pretty sure was real. Like, it uses the Griffith Observatory as a location. I assume they filmed on location, but there are times when it still looks like they green screened it. Instead of using the budget to make a couple scenes look great, they opt to make a bunch of scenes look OK. Not a great trade off.

 

The consensus on Moonfall is that it’s fun but it could’ve been a lot more fun. I can’t disagree on this one. It has a few decent moments. The occasional humor is happy to settle for groaners, which would play better if this was overall a cheesier movie. The cast feels like a poorly constructed roster. Played by a bunch of A-listers, they probably could’ve made those characters work. With the actors they got, they should’ve found more ways to play to their strengths or cast a little more for fit than best available. This movie is way more Geostorm than ID4, which isn’t a dealbreaker depending on what you are looking for.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

 

After the Credits

OK. That last scene. Please don’t tell me they were angling for a sequel. It’s hard to think of a movie better set up for a definitive ending. It’s only going to get worse the more we know about the aliens. The world is so totally fucked that a sequel would have to take place a decade later to even pretend that infrastructure is back. In a world where the gambit of this movie did work and it was a box office hit, no one wants to leave it thinking “I can’t wait for the next time the Moon falls!”