![]() ![]() When the rednecks found our party (again!) in a petty car chase, I literally laughed out loud. I didn't care what happened to anyone back on Earth. This first half stalls with setting up so many characters to follow that you simply won't care about. The movie also takes an inordinate amount of time to get back to space after a prologue, almost halfway through its two hours. Provide the goods, and Moonfall just doesn't. ![]() If your movie is going to exist primarily in a junk food realm, then you need to either have as minimal distractions as possible to rip you from the believability of this world, or you simply need to veer into it and accept that the instability and chaos will be part of the general appeal. Some of the CGI reminded me of moments from 2008's Torque, where the high-speed backgrounds resembled badly composited video game texture blurs. Plenty of the larger effects are quite awe-inspiring and suitably terrifying in depicting an awesome reality, and then others look like they didn't quite have enough money when it came time to render. One character says, "The moon can't do these things," and another character waves away that pertinent thought and says, almost directly to the audience, "Yeah, but this isn't a normal moon, so forget everything." The special effects are also quite hit or miss. It doesn't seem like it matters, but watching characters do Super Mario Brother-level jumps has a fun appeal as well as being impossibly goofy. At that point the movie becomes an inconsistent video game with its liberal use of physics. It's the kind of movie that demands you shut off your brain and just go along with the scientific gobbledygook, especially once the moon begins making Earth's gravity go all haywire. It felt like a mediocre hodgepodge of other Emmerich disaster movies and veered into campy nonsense at many points. I watched Moonfall with general indifference. After two years of life during COVID-19, maybe our idea of sci-fi escapism isn't quite what it used to be. In times of struggle, human beings enjoy fantasies about surviving fantastic odds, or at least that was the established way of thinking. It seemed like a smart bet as disaster movies have performed well for Emmerich, like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow. It didn't work out that way and Moonfall reportedly will lose over a hundred million dollars for its investors. It was believed by industry watchers that Moonfall would be the kind of epic that people would go back to the movies to experience, watching the scale of destruction on the biggest screen and cheering along. ![]() It's a Roland Emmerich disaster movie where he does exactly what Roland Emmerich does best: expansive scenes of cataclysmic destruction on the biggest scale possible. Moonfall looks like the big, schlocky sci-fi disaster movie that Judd Apatow would be satirizing with The Bubble. ![]()
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