One of the more unexpected effects this pandemic has had on my movie-going life is an almost total lack of exposure to bad films. With the effort and precautions required to see a movie in theaters, I’ve found myself exclusively choosing to see things I know I’ll enjoy. Couple that with the production slowdown at major studios, which has drastically limited the number of options one has to choose from at the box office, and you’re left with an audience (myself included) that’s mostly sticking with the safe bets. We know the MCU is reliable, so their movies draw an audience. I know I like Speilberg and Del Toro, so I saw West Side Story and Nightmare Alley. These new viewing habits have left me bereft of fresh trash movies to laugh my way through, and as a result I hadn’t seen a bad movie in theaters in over two years. That all changed this weekend when I attended an almost entirely empty screening of the new disaster film Moonfall, a movie where astronauts fight the moon. 2022 is off to a good, bad start.
Moonfall is the brainchild of famed disaster movie director Roland Emmerich, who does not seem to have updated his sensibilities at all since the ’90s. (There are big Independence Day vibes throughout this movie.) The film follows disgraced astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), who reluctantly teams up with his former colleague Jo (Halle Berry) and an internet conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) to stop the moon from crashing into Earth. We’re treated to plenty of fully rendered sequences of the earth being thoroughly destroyed, all while our three unlikely heroes blast themselves into space to figure out why the moon is out of orbit. It probably goes without saying by now, but this is not a good movie. Instead, what’s interesting about Moonfall is all the various ways in which it doesn’t work. Allow me to explain.
(For the sake of clarity, I will be dividing the film into two parts in order to best capture how disjointed the storytelling is. “Sequence A” will represent the first 90 minutes of the movie, “Sequence B” the last 20.)
“Sequence A” is a big, loud, stupid disaster movie. It is everything you would expect from late-career Roland Emmerich, and is quite a bit of brainless fun. Emmerich loves a big high concept premise for why the world is going to end. In 2012 it was the Mayan calendar, in The Day After Tomorrow it was a new ice age, and now in Moonfall it’s the moon spinning out of orbit. Whatever it takes to show all the major cities being destroyed. As with all his movies, the characters of “Sequence A” are all silly stereotypes who bluntly explain their motivations and backstories to each other in order to get to the explosions. Things like “logic” and “science” are thrown out the window in favor of 100% pure B-movie cheese. The moon is about to collide with Earth. Astronauts want to go to the moon to try to stop it, the military wants to blow it up, and all other civilians run around trying to survive the apocalypse. It’s a very silly plot, but it’s what we’ve come to expect from this director, and it makes up most of the film’s runtime. However, “Sequence B” is where the movie really hits its stride.
“Sequence B” is the very end of the movie. It makes up at most 20 minutes of the runtime, and yet is such an insane, game-changing twist that it entirely reshapes the movie, rendering everything in “Sequence A” meaningless filler. We are informed, through a very sudden expository monologue, that this movie was about much more than the moon simply falling out of orbit. I won’t spoil it here, because it’s truly hilarious and worth seeing for yourself, but this final, last-minute explanation of what we’ve actually been watching is so out of left field that it feels like you are watching a different movie. In fact, it barely feels like it’s part of any movie at all. The addition of “Sequence B” at the end of Moonfall feels like Roland Emmerich stopped his disaster movie mid-climax, and just attached an entirely separate conspiracy theory manifesto to the end instead. The presence of “Sequence B” elevates Moonfall to a level of unhinged absurdity usually reserved for the Syfy channel. It is the most bizarre ending I have seen in a very long time and I loved every second of its utter insanity.
That being said, Moonfall doesn’t even consistently work on a “turn-your-brain-off” level. The movie overall has a strong anti-science bias that’s pretty hard to look past in 2022. NASA is presented as the bad guys of the story, a main character talks frequently about his love for Elon Musk, countless government agencies cover up the “dark secret truths” about the moon landing, and so on. In an age where fringe theory misinformation and pseudo-science are literally killing people daily, it’s somewhat difficult to enjoy a movie where we’re supposed to cheer on the conspiracy theorists even on an ironic level. Of course, it is still a very funny watch in spite of this, so make of this information what you will.
Moonfall is the first bad movie I have seen in theaters since Cats, and definitely filled that void dutifully with tons of unhinged plot twists and turns. It is a wild ride that has to be seen to be believed.
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