Roland Emmerich films are generally regarded as pretty critic-proof. The man isn’t bothered about making movies that’ll be adored by elites. He wants his audiences to have fun – nothing more, nothing less. And that’s admirable! He’s made some great movies in the past (I’ve a particular soft spot for The Day After Tomorrow, purely for being the first disaster movie I ever saw as a kid) … but his latest isn’t all that. As much as it pains me to say it, Moonfall is actually tragically underwhelming, wasting its bonkers premise and incredible cast.
If the title didn’t already give it away, Moonfall is about the Moon falling to Earth. There’s much more to it than that (hoo boy is there), but that’s the basic idea. Once people start noticing the Moon is out of orbit, NASA and various others start scrambling to solve it before the Moon collides with Earth and destroys the whole planet. Written down, that sounds absolutely bonkers – as it should! It’s the kind of gloriously stupid synopsis that should pave the way for a mindless two hours of fun. But Moonfall doesn’t do that. In fact, it struggles to be two hours of anything.
"There's no need for a movie like this to be 130 minutes"
For one thing, it’s far too long. There’s no need for a movie like this to be 130 minutes, and there’s so much boring excess that could easily be trimmed away by a good edit. The poor editing doesn’t stop at the runtime, though: both momentary and structural editing are extremely poorly carried out. There’s some painfully obvious ADR that makes many conversations a distracting watch, while the moment-to-moment cuts are far too quick – particularly in the final act. What could have been a fun finale is rendered moot by bad edits that refuse to hold a shot for more than a couple of seconds. The entire flow of the film is badly edited, too: the pacing is beyond poor as the film takes well over an hour for anything to actually happen, instead deciding to wallow in uninteresting melodrama on Earth. We’re not here for that! Give us the falling Moon!
Sadly the Moon takes so long to fall that we’ve nearly checked out by the time it does. The entire first half is more preoccupied with dull conversations, bad compositing, and unnecessary fat jokes at the expense of John Bradley. The latter of these issues is one of the film’s worst: we don’t often see plus-sized people in mega-budget movies, and with how Bradley is treated here it’s easy to see why. It’s possible that his character is intended as a subversion of the “plus-sized geek that nobody believes in” trope (particularly given how he gets his dues towards the end of the film), but there’s so much nonsense before that that it’s really unclear.
And it isn’t the other characters that make this unclear (no one makes mention of his weight at all, which is admittedly a nice change), but the film itself: KC lives alone with his cat, runs a conspiracy theorist group, and says things like “What would Elon do?” He also pops pills for a variety of things, including IBS (which is used as a particularly icky punchline), and is generally considered a bit of a nutjob. Not a great deal of progress for plus-sized people in blockbusters!
"[There's] not a great deal of progress for plus-sized people in blockbusters"
The skinny cast members are fronted by Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry, both of whom put in solid performances … in the wrong movie. For as much as the film as a whole feels like it could possibly be in on the joke (that it’s garbage and knows it), Wilson and Berry don’t really feel like they are. Both play it super straight – quite literally in Berry’s case, as any possibilities of her character being gay after her divorce are quashed when the potential girlfriend living in her house is revealed to be a nanny, not a partner. A shame!
All core characters are given the usual boring family members to care about, but these subplots all detract from the fun stuff of the finale. There are admittedly some great ideas in the Earthbound side of the final act (the Moon messing with gravity as it gets closer to the planet makes for some potentially fun set-pieces), but they’re not as interesting as the space-set shenanigans. Watching Patrick Wilson fly a spaceship inside the Moon is infinitely more fun than watching a dull-looking CGI Lexus drive away from some other dull-looking CGI cars.
Taken together, it feels like Moonfall can’t quite decide what it wants to be. It’s too wacky to be a played-straight disaster movie, and too badly straight to be a fun one. Instead it’s stuck in some kind of limbo, caught between what it is and what it could be. Best skip this one, and revisit last year’s Greenland instead.
Verdict:
There’s certainly some escapism to be had in Moonfall, but as a whole piece it feels like a missed opportunity, and a marked step down for Emmerich as a director. A handful of good set-pieces and a ridiculous final act twist can’t distract from the abundance of fat jokes, dull colour palettes, ugly cinematography, and bad CGI. It’s fun, but not as fun as an Emmerich movie should be.
5/10
Header image courtesy of EFD. All rights reserved.