Director Roland Emmerich rose to
stardom with 1996's box office champ Independence Day, a story of an
alien invasion of Earth. Emmerich has kept returning to the disaster-porn well
for years, and his latest effort, Moonfall, is a disaster in and of
itself.
A nerdy outcast (John Bradley)
determines the moon is out of orbit. He enlists the aid of a disgraced
astronaut (Patrick Wilson) in convincing NASA to take action. Eventually,
Wilson, Bradley, and Wilson's former colleague (Halle Berry) must take the lead
in saving the world. There are environmental disasters brought upon because of
the moon's change in orbit, plus mysterious lifeforms on the moon that seem to
be causing the change.
The biggest problem here is the script
(co-written by Emmerich with Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen). Even by the
standards of an Emmerich film, no plot element here holds up to even the
mildest scrutiny. It's ridiculous, but in a very wooden way. It's not
imaginative ridiculous. It's just dull. The dialogue is bad, the plot screeches
to a halt at one point for a massive exposition dump, and there's a pointless
and stupid subplot involving bandits. A halfhearted attempt at comic relief is
lifted directly from The Lost World (not a great film, but a classic in
comparison to this). The action scenes are lifeless, ho-hum man vs. CGI stuff.
