Three stars. Well, four stars, really, if you’re down with what German filmmaker Roland Emmerich does in his big-budget, big (but midrange) cast, big concept disaster flicks. I think we’re going to get a Roland Emmerich reappraisal soon, and I am here for it — I watched The Day After Tomorrow (2004) yesterday, in the afterglow of Moonfall, and had a real good time of it, and I will hold up his last film, the WWII epic Midway (2019), as a genuinely good war movie.
Midway may be as close to a prestige picture as ol’ Roland the Heedless Movie Director gets, though. Moonfall is made of much pulpier material. The film is based on one of my fave bits of pseudoscientific nonsense, the Hollow Moon Hypothesis, which posits that the moon is a) hollow (as you could probably guess from the name) and sometimes b) actually an alien satellite of unknown origin or purpose. It’s a big, dumb, incredibly fun bit of craziness that is right up there with von Daniken in terms of general nuttiness and appeal. In Moonfall, fringe “scientist” KC Houseman (John Bradley) is a believer, and he’s been quietly swiping scientific data that shows that the Moon’s orbit is degrading — or perhaps changing on purpose. That’s insane, right? But he finds an unlikely ally in the form of disgraced astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), who, a decade back, lost a crew member to something weird that seemed to strike at their space shuttle from out of a lunar crater (don’t @ me, orbital engineers — the science doesn’t matter).
Of course, the moon really is shifting in its orbit, and as that wreaks havoc on tides, the atmosphere, and gravity (again, don’t @ me) and the U.S. government prepares to nuke the moon. But Harper, Houseman, Harper’s old NASA buddy Jocinda ‘Jo’ Fowler (Halle Berry), and a ragtag crew prepare to launch their own mission, swiping the shuttle Endeavour out of a museum to do so. And what they find …
Read more at Mr Movies Film Blog.
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