Directed by:
Roland EmmerichCinematography:
Robby BaumgartnerCast:
Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Charlie Plummer, Kelly Yu, Michael Peña, Donald Sutherland, Eme Ikwuakor, Carolina Bartczak, Maxim Roy (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
In Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, a mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit around Earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it. With mere weeks before impact and the world on the brink of annihilation, NASA executive and former astronaut Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) is convinced she has the key to saving us all, but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), and a conspiracy theorist, KC Houseman (John Bradley), believe her. The unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, only to find out that our Moon is not what we think it is. (Entertainment in Video)
(more)Reviews (13)
In Moonfall, there is not even a trace of anything that made last year’s The Tomorrow War, a B-movie in the same genre, so great (inventive work with clichés, sincere emotions, nice visual stylization). Emmerich disappeared into a black hole. This can’t be his movie. Or maybe he's just realizing that he has nothing left to say after 2012. An Asylum screenplay with an A-list cast. I still can’t believe that I saw Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry reciting that dialogue.
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This is so heavenly stupid that it's kind of beautiful. This movie is about 60 years late, and that's actually a good thing. I felt like I was watching vintage sci-fi from the 1950s again, only that Roland goes much, much further with the stupidity. In the 1950s, during the Golden Age of science fiction, these pieces were made like Bata's trainers, nothing makes sense to today's viewer, but you still have fun and smile because you can feel the sincere effort to make a good film. Probably like Edward D. Wood Jr. when he was hanging models of flying saucers on string, Roland has the technical side of the craft down pat, but the boys are on the same page in terms of message. Emmerich is a genre on his own. I don’t want to watch it again, but it was a guilty pleasure.
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The moon has deviated from its orbit and will collide with the Earth in a few weeks. Only two former astronauts and one annoying conspiracy theorist can save the world, but they have no idea what awaits them in space. Roland Emmerich rips himself off and makes another disaster movie, but one that is a shadow of Independence Day or 2012. It's just not very entertaining this time around, which makes how stupid it all is stand out that much more.
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In terms of price and performance, Roland Emmerich has already destroyed the planet several times in a much better way and with a nicer humanistic furor. This incel-conspiracy vision is fine as long as it plays by the rules of a disaster film, but then my brain was skipping out on this attempt at lobotomized sci-fi. It should have ended up on Netflix, because I haven't seen such ugly green-screens on the big screen in a long time. Being able to put the laundry in the washing machine and look out the window would only have added to the film. I don’t expect much from Emmerich, but certainly something more fun than Moonfall.
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It has a bit of an Independence Day 2 feel. I like Emmerich, he handles the VFX attractions well, but the rest is noticeably inferior to the competition. I found everything here to be incredibly rushed forward (it's quite a ironic that Don't Look Up was able to present the threat in a much more interesting, exacerbated and intense way), which is a shame, I believe with a strong background this could have been very good. At the same time it's a shame that Emmerich had to mix in artificial intelligence and aliens, in other circumstances I would have welcomed it, but here the threat of the moon alone would have been enough to give the whole thing a more serious feel. It's cheesy and quite entertaining, but it's a shame that the destruction itself takes a while. 5.5/10.
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Yesterday I was in Apollo 10 1/2, today it’s the regular Apollo 11... Emmerich destroys a planet again in a similar way, but this time he does it a bit differently. Perhaps everything is a bit more laid back here and the destruction isn’t as opulent as in his previous disaster hits like 2012 or the climatic The Day After Tomorrow. This time round, the destruction somehow takes a back seat. The main things here are the journey to the center of the Moon and the mystery of the Dyson Sphere, entertaining mucking about involving a cloud and a decrepit space shuttle, family values and great lines. It’s a hair’s breadth worse than the other Emmerich movies to date, but it’s still good entertainment for two hours, during which your brain can get some rest.
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A mix of Independence Day and 2012, but it can’t hold a candle to either. Sure, this is primarily light entertainment, or classic Emmerich, if you will, though even lighter than usual because it’s worse than even Godzilla in character work, dialogue and level of stupidity, and that's saying a hell of a lot. Surprisingly, even the visual effects flourishes don't dazzle to any extreme, and the once so inventive wizard has fallen into the average green screen, where he greases up one unimaginative make-up scene after another. What would Elon do? I'm sure he wouldn't have made this occasionally funny travesty.
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Since Moonfall's script could not have been devised by even the most consummate conspiracy theorist, there can be no doubt that the filmmakers are not serious. In my opinion, this is a deliberate contribution to the category of not perhaps intentionally stupid, but logic-ignoring and the most insane fear-mongering B-movies of the 50s, 60s or 70s, which pretended to be serious, but were mainly concerned with entertaining the audience and packing cinemas. This is exactly the feeling I had, much stronger than in all of Emmerich's previous efforts. I like his work, but the films that stand out interestingly are 10,000 BC and Midway, which I liked the least by far. Why? Because Emmerich wanted to deliver a serious story on the one hand and a big visual effects spectacle on the other, but the combination didn't work. At the same time, a serious story without lavish effects can certainly be made (The Patriot, Anonymous) as well as overblown visual effects spectacles that don't take themselves seriously, whether they're about saving or destroying our world or another, or just a proper 80s school action flick (the, in my opinion, underrated White House Down). This time he dispensed with the need for any seriousness altogether, coming up with a wacky but really unorthodox plot that allowed him to destroy a bit more and differently than what and how he had been destroying so far. The plot is heavily condensed, a couple of days go by without warning between several scenes, during which something important happens that other films would spend more time on, and meanwhile the giant moon is approaching the Earth, constantly rising and setting, doing doggy stunts with gravity that make many scenes really crazy and funny. For example, the naivety with which they travel back and forth from Earth and solve individual problems is almost Meliés-like. You watch it with a smile, see how nice it looks, enjoy the truly original design of the monster... If I like the naive films that this reminded me of, then I have no reason not to like Moonfall.
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Thanks Roland! This is the kind of honest bollocks, obviously exaggerated (as it’s based on crazy conspiracies and genre aesthetics of the 50s, and even the 90s) and going full throttle from the start, that has been missing in cinemas for a long time. I don't really understand the complaints about the haphazard logic and the final existential interlude – it's a science fiction movie, not a NASA instructional film. And it's a bloody fun sci-fi, where the deadlines work brilliantly and the deliberately overblown and implausible big-screen plot simply draws you in. Some of the dialogue is admittedly cheesy, and the smoothness of the smoothly narrated Independence Day and 2012 makes up for the overly fast pace in places, but whatever. I was smiling like a little boy and it never ceased to surprise me. Emmerich still does this like nobody else in the business. 75 %
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I admit I enjoyed Moonfall and I had a dumbfounded smile on my face during all the derailed craziness. However, you have to approach it as a total no-brainer (especially when listening to the dialogues). It was a pleasant surprise that John Bradley's character, who I was most worried about after watching the trailers, ended up being the movie's highlight. I enjoyed the plotline with him, Patrick Wilson, and Halle Berry. However, Moonfall also features a forced parallel plotline with family members on earth, which weighs it down, so it drags, and those moments were a stumbling block for me. Scenes with horribly written, uninteresting, unlikable, and even horribly acted characters (I do not want to see Charlie Plummer in anything again, ever) turned a stupid, if entertaining, guilty pleasure into a painful embarrassment.
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I quite like Roland Emmerich's (not only) disaster movies, They are weaker in terms of their script, but never pretend to be smart. In Moonfall, the director rips off his earlier films, which wouldn't have been a bad thing, but in this case the final product didn't impress me much, and that goes also to the audiovisual execution, which is a shame when it comes to Emmerich. The constellation of characters in Moonfall is very reminiscent of 2012, but visually it was on a different level. The idea of Moonfall isn’t entirely bad, but it bludgeoned by the script, which, though not surprising in Emmerich's case, here it was very blatant, with more than one pathetic moment. Better two stars!
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Roland Emmerich has been into aliens, apocalypses and outer space for practically his entire film career, so it's no surprise that his latest film is in a similar vein. With Moonfall, though, he wasn't afraid to combine all three of the aforementioned into one, to the point where I felt like my head was going to explode from the sheer number of elements I saw when the film was over. Whether that's a good or bad thing is probably a matter of preference, but it's perhaps a little too overwrought for me. We do get a disaster on Earth (due to the moon falling), as well as space travel, alien civilizations, and an element of artificial intelligence. I liked the idea to a certain extent, but from a certain point on I was a bit confused and wondered if the "less is sometimes more" rule would apply here. Anyway, I guess the principle with a film like this is not to find faults, because there are always faults, but to enjoy it - and that's what was done here. The film has good enough visuals, a cool leading trio featuring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley (I'm a bit disappointed that Michael Peña is only here as a supporting role, because he is literally a walking humor box) and a few novel ideas, and the running time of 130 minutes passes quite briskly (although cutting it by 30 would probably be a good thing, but whatever). All in all, I had fun, that’s pretty much all I can say. It could have been better, it could have been worse, it's a decent average that doesn't reach the best in the genre, but I love these disaster movies.
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Too bad. Emmerich seems to be slowly but surely degrading since his successful career peak in 2004. The Day After Tomorrow was appealing and very likeable in its authenticity. Here, however, there is perhaps no question of any potential realism. Visually mediocre and plot-wise just plain moronic.
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