Moonfall

Moonfall is dreadful muck, awful even by Roland Emmerich standards. But, it will make you laugh. A lot. And that's what we need. Go see it, so in the future you'll be able to point at the TV screen when it's on while you cry laughing and say you were there, you got to see this disaster of a disaster film on the big screen.

"Fuck the moon", that's the graffiti scrawled onto the side of the only working space shuttle still on American soil. It's being brought out of commission to head into space as the final chance to save the planet Earth from destruction. The moon has been knocked off orbit by a mysterious force and now it's on a collision course with us and only three people can stop it all. Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), two astronauts who fell out after an earlier mission was wrecked by a mysterious space accident and who must now work together again, and K.C. Houseman (John Bradley playing Samwell Tarley with a podcast), the conspiracy theorist who brought what was happening to the attention of the world via social media. As they head skyward the proximity of the moon is creating chaos on earth and their families try to stay alive on terra firma but thieves, meteors and a general lack of oxygen are the big issues of the day.

This is the worst blockbuster you'll see in 2022. Probably 23 and 24 as well. It's appalling. It's beyond stupid. Your jaw will drop late in the story when you finally find out what's happening. It bigs up the likes of Space X and conspiracy theorists instead of burying and shaming them. It fails on every movie level. Characterisation is non existent, the plot makes no sense, there's no urgency, you don't care about anyone, it's so choppy you'll think it's stupidity has made you black out and miss important information. It feels like a 3 hour film cut down to 2 and as a result is missing whole chunks of plot and exposition. There's no transition between hearing about something and it happening. We never find out how exactly K.C. used social media to let the world know what's up. We're told disaster is due in 3 weeks time and then skip nearly all that time. There's no build up to the moon's effects on the tides or earthquakes, they just underwhelmingly occur. We're expected to understand stuff we've never been told about. Great actors like Donald Sutherland turn up for 60 seconds and vanish totally.  We're asked to cry for people we've spent no time with. No one feels connected. Nothing matters.

But, and this is an important but, it somehow manages to hit that sweet spot of being so bad that all you can do is give in and laugh at it all. Charlie Plummer's (as Brian's son Sonny) OH WELL expression when an entire mountain explodes in front of him is a big treat. The SAD MOMENT that means nothing to anyone it seems. The beyond idiotic car chase. The BIG HERO scene that conspiracy theorists will dine out on for years. Halle Berry's character Jo just happening to be married to the man with the firing codes for all of the United states nukes. At times it really feels like a parody of Emmerich's previous disaster movie work but it's not a patch on any of it, even absolute tosh like 2012 feels like a masterwork after you've seen Moonfall.

Patrick Wilson, thankfully, seems to have realised how terrible it all is and has fun as a result. Poor Halle Berry plays it straight and comes out of it very poorly. John Bradley's K.C. gets treated way with way too much reverence. He's the joke of a conspiracy theorist that gets proved right and it feels like an regrettable choice especially in this day and age of tin foil loonies. Films should be mocking them and not lauding them. That might sound mean but it needs to happen. Everyone else just feels cut to the bone, popping up every now and then to deliver a line and then vanish again. It's not a film anyone involved will be highlighting on their CV.

Moonfall is out now in the cinema. Go if you want something to laugh at. Other than that avoid at all costs.