12a/3 stars
Fans of silly and preposterously-themed sci-fi disaster movies rejoice, for Roland
Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) - the self-styled
master of the genre - has a new film out and it’s one of his most insane yet. Starring Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry and Game of Thrones alum John Bradley, Moonfall has it all, a
doomsday premise, gargantuan action set pieces and mind-blowing visual effects
to boot.
In the film, a mysterious force knocks the moon from its orbit, hurling it on a
collision course with Earth. With only weeks before impact and the planet on
the brink of total destruction, NASA executive and former astronaut Jocinda
Fowler (Berry) has an idea that can save the planet. Luckily for her, and for
us, Brian Harper (Wilson), a formally respected, now disgraced astronaut is at
hand to help stop the total inhalation of Earth. The two are joined by lovable
conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (Bradley) who believes he can help solve the
mystery of why the moon has been acting so strangely.
Never has the expression “jumped the shark” been more fitting than in this instance.
Emmerich, love him or hate him, really knows how to take a premise and really
run with it, and for that he should be commended. Moonfall not only manages to
be even more preposterous and ridiculously over-the-top than 2012, but it does
it in the most spectacular, jaw-dropping fashion. There are levels of madness
to this film that succeed in eclipsing every other Emmerich production that came before it, which is both good and bad.
Although lacking the thematic subtlety of a film such as Greenland - Ric Roman
Waugh’s 2020 film about a comet heading for Earth - Moonfall does
something we’ve seldom seen before, it is a production that is fully and
unabashedly committed to every bit of madness talking place on the screen from
start to finish.
With hilariously corny dialogue and an outlandishly far-fetched premise, Moonfall
is by far the silliest movie I’ve seen in a while, and yet it still manages
to be both entraining and very funny in parts. The last half hour alone is more
than worth the entry fee, but one just has to remember to check their sanity
and intellectual capacity at the door.
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