‘Moonfall’ Review: Roland Emmerich’s Latest Disaster Film Should Have Been a Satire

The moon falling out of orbit and threatening to destroy planet earth isn’t the biggest disaster in Roland Emmerich’s latest release “Moonfall.”

Anyone familiar with Emmerich’s work, which spans end-of-the-world blockbusters like “Independence Day” (1996), “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004), and “2012” (2009), knows that Emmerich has a history of delivering awe-inspiring visual effects alongside characters that just manage to tug at the heart-strings — even if his scripts often fail to match the grandeur of his movies’ colossal scale. But in “Moonfall,” Emmerich abandons the signature blend of graphics and sympathetic characters that makes his earlier movies so effective. Instead, he smothers a promising premise with cheap comedy and cardboard characters in a tale so unbelievable it borders on satire.

Disgraced former astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), acting NASA director Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry), and nutty pseudo-scientist KC Houseman (John Bradley) try their best to convince the audience to root for them as they attempt to save the world from an alien inhabiting the moon and inducing its collision with the earth. But with a script so thoroughly lacking in character formation and development, even big names like Wilson and Berry fail to sustain any engagement with their “Moonfall” counterparts’ plight. Most of the cast suffers from stilted performances, and whatever personal complexities are laid down at the beginning of the movie — the lingering resentment Harper harbors for NASA after his public dismissal, for instance, or Fowler’s nanny Michelle’s (Kelly Yu) status as a foreign exchange student complicating her entrance into national safety camps — are seemingly forgotten for obligatory action sequences like a high-speed car chase in the Rocky Mountains.

Emmerich’s reputation for producing stunning visual effects that, if nothing else, make his imagined disasters terrifying to behold, also falls short in “Moonfall.” The use of CGI is obvious in the aforementioned car chase, where everyone’s Hondas stay miraculously shiny and brand-new-looking as they plow through layers of snow and moon debris. The Rocky Mountain backdrop that serves as the setting for most of the latter half of the movie is as believable as Houseman’s theory that the moon is an artificial construct formed by aliens. Still, it’s clear where most of the film’s $140 million budget went. The strange, tessellating shape of the alien is appropriately mystifying and scary, and the visual effects depicting the moon’s surface in crisp detail is nothing short of astonishing.

These few moments of visual reprieve can’t make up for the fact that the movie’s whiplash pacing renders its storyline ridiculous and downright unbelievable. Houseman's doomsday theory about the moon takes a millisecond to blow up on social media; the next night, civilization crumbles as people riot in the streets. NASA reacts to the impending disaster in the blink of an eye by launching an investigative vessel manned by a full crew, as if the agency had always had a plan for the end of the world on the back burner. The army rolls out an old space shuttle from a museum and prepares it for launch in the time it takes Fowler to convince Harper to pilot the thing — in other words, the few seconds Houseman needs to whisper in Harper’s ear, "Say yes."

“Moonfall”’s breakneck speed is as laughable as it is implausible — one almost can't believe the movie was allowed to run like this without Emmerich and the writers wanting to satirize the disaster genre or jabbing some kind of joke at the audience. Unfortunately, it's clear that “Moonfall” speeds through its plot not to provide any kind of light-hearted genre-criticism, but only to arrive at the much-belated point where hapless Brian Harper can save the day. For ticket-buyers who simply want a sequence of cheesy, mindless action sequences with no claim to plausibility, “Moonfall” might prove satisfactory. Anyone hoping for a hint of intellectual or emotional stimulation should look elsewhere.

If “Moonfall” would just stick with the satirical bent it occasionally and perhaps accidentally infuses into the script, it might actually be a semi-enjoyable film. There are some genuinely funny scenes in the movie: When Harper somehow manages to launch a rocket into the sky despite its being doused by a Noah’s ark-level tidal wave, you can’t help but laugh incredulously. In the satirical version of “Moonfall,” these accidentally funny scenes become intentional, and even the hollowness of its characters reads as designed. In the real “Moonfall,” comedic quips like Houseman’s “I love Elon” may elicit a chuckle, if only they weren’t totally discordant with the gravitas that Emmerich wants the audience to treat the rest of his film with. But it will take more than clever one-liners and the moon falling for audiences to take “Moonfall” seriously.