“Moonfall” depicts the horror that would unfold if the moon were to go out of orbit and crash into the earth. Before that big bump, Earth’s gravity would be progressively out of wack, while the moon would dump debris as it gets closer. For good measure, Emmerich throws in a “Transformers”-type edge to the hare-brained science about why this could be happening, but that too comes with a bland imagination and execution. Don’t be confused, this movie has more worth as a comparison to Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” which also dealt with a killer moon, than a decent piece of entertainment.
The American military decide that the moon, well, they gotta nuke it. But there’s something else going on with the moon—something inside it—and it’s ultimately up to three smart people to stop the moon from destroying earth, including a disgraced astronaut Brain Harper (Patrick Wilson), a courageous head of NASA and Brian’s fellow astronaut partner Jocinda Fowl (Halle Berry), and a conspiracy theorist named KC (John Bradley) who has long thought that the moon was a megastructure. KC finds out about this change of course and leaks it to the media, with NASA equating that there are only about three weeks left. They take off in a shuttle with eventually no crew on the ground, and it doesn’t feel triumphant so much as the film trying to minimize its cast numbers.
All three of our heroes have their personal connections that make for ho-hum on-the-ground drama: there’s Brian and his troublesome son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) and his ex-wife and their two girls; Jocinda and her son and her ex-husband and the foreign exchange student she makes babysit her kid (Kelly Yu); KC and his mother and his cat, Fuzz Aldrin (given an amazing close-up).
Co-written with Harald Kloser and Spencer Cohen, “Moonfall” is a lumbering, long locomotive of one cliche attached to another, making time pass slowly even though there is so much juggling of these different one-dimensional relationships. The human stories are gratuitous themselves instead of involving us, so telegraphed in the drama of their characters. This is how a stepfather and angsty son reunite midway through the movie: “I don’t hate you.” “You know what? I’ll take it.”
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