Just the Ticket #153: Moonfall

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster

The moon is very important, Ticketholders!

Its existence is the reason we have tides and currents and a day/night cycle, among other things. It's the proposed and eponymous cause of so-called "lunatic" behavior, which spawned werewolf/lycanthrope folklore. It's the namesake of the first workday of the week in several languages. And it's the chief plot mechanic in Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask, where it will crash into Termina and kill everyone if Link doesn't do a perfect three-day speedrun.

Huh...maybe whoever vandalized that space shuttle in today's movie was right.

Since everyone and their cat's brain-dead grandmother has reviewed this movie despite no one seeing it, and I've been reviewing Roland Emmerich movies this month, and I'd rather get into talking about the movie because I can't think of a good segue (again!) into "90s disaster movie king makes box office failure that's just both Independence Day movies again, but the moon is the villain this time," please remember to Become A Ticketholder because you haven't already, comment your favorite Roland Emmerich movie at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can watch a good movie again for once in my life, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my lunatic content.

But, yeah; 90s disaster movie king and 2010s (and 2020s, for that matter) China shill Roland Emmerich made a movie called Moonfall where the moon falls and messes with gravity and oxygen and tides and bombards visibly evacuated CGI cities and avalanche-proof CGI mountains (because having one of your six digital effects teams animate avalanches didn't factor into the 146 million dollar budget, I guess) with debris of sufficient size and quantity to wipe out the coolest and most marketable species in our planet's prehistory, but here only give our expressionless supporting cast something cool to look at while Catwoman, Ed Warren, and Samwell Tarley use a broken space shuttle and a Chinese rover to stop the smoke monster from Lost (because I can't stop referencing Lost this month, either) from using the moon to turn Earth into a Majora's Mask Game Over screen.

2022's Moonfall begins as any good Roland Emmerich movie should (but Moonfall also begins this way): with a catchy but plot-ironic song. Independence Day had "It's the End Of the World As We Know It" by REM, and Moonfall has Toto's "Africa" (which was a four-year-old meme at the time because Weezer did a cover of it in 2018 that's pretty good. Just don't look up their cover of "Enter Sandman," which is viscerally, psychologically terrible). Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson's faces are digitally superimposed over astronaut helmets in CGI outer space, along with their plucky sidekick who has six days left until retirement, when the smoke monster from Lost (as portrayed by Transformium from Transformers: Age Of Extinction) comes along. I like that the creature is mostly obscured here to downplay the scale of it, and that Wilson is able to convey its threat level through expressions alone, even though he's most likely staring at a tennis ball on a stick with confetti dreadlocks in the middle of a lime-puke-colored room. But I'm disappointed to say that his throwaway line about not being able to dance to save his life didn't end up being a Chekov's Gun. Like, imagine how much more fun and insane this movie would have been if Luke Wilson had to save the Earth from lunar impact...by dancing. I can't wait for Moonfall: The Musical on Broadway....

Anyway, Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) gets knocked unconscious, the sidekick dies, and national hero astronaut Brian Harper (Luke Wilson) is discredited and fired in a court of law because the government has known about the nano-monster since the Apollo 11 mission and they couldn't finish an EMP bomb to kill it with for the next fifty-three years because President Snow was in charge of the budget or something. So because Emmerich tropes need to happen, ten more years go by and now Harper is Randy Quaid with Jeff Goldblum marital problems, Fowler is the head of NASA now, so she's Will Smith crossed with Vivica A. Fox and Bill Pullman but less interesting than that sounds. There's even a moment where they use the "inspirational speech" music while she gets on a microphone to talk, but the music keeps going even though she's telling everybody to give up and go home. Halle Berry's character here is also a divorcee with a young, hot Chinese nanny, but this movie can't have any sexual, romantic, or emotional stakes because China want money and see fake stuff go boom now that nukes are a no-no and virus didn't work. Completing our main trio (because making a conspiracy theorist who thinks Elon Musk is smart the hero in your hundred-plus-million-dollar blockbuster in 2022 is a good idea?) is Game Of Thrones star John Bradley as K.C. Houseman, a "mega-structurist" with a mother with Alzheimer's and a cat who might be Goose from Captain Marvel. The movie is trying to make him a funny, British amalgamation of Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsh, and Brent Spiner, but the "likable conspiracy theorist saves the day" angle of his character is cringe-worthy at best, and terrifying at worst.

And speaking of Emmerich tropes, combined character types, and conspiracy theories, go get your blender! The monster is a rogue nanotech swarm AI created by ancient alien humans who downloaded their collective consciousness into mega-structure spaceships and spread throughout the universe, one of which was the moon, so the moon 3D-printed the Earth and seeded it with ancient human DNA, but because the monster is drawn to large concentrations of its creators' genes and technology, it found the Earth and burrowed into the moon, where it was discovered by the Apollo 11 mission, "explaining" the period of electrical failure during the mission, and instead of going down to Earth and killing every human being personally, as would make logical sense if mass-murder and genocide were logical acts, it decided to be the one character in movie history to listen to Ellen Ripley: using the moon to nuke the site from orbit is the only way to be sure. So instead, it spends the next fifty-plus years messing with the moon's white dwarf power source (because in this universe, there's a nanomachine swarm that can survive physical contact with something that is between 14,000 and 450,000 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface, and human beings in an old, decommissioned space shuttle can survive being in walking distance of it and look directly at it without eye protection) to force it out of its programmed orbit and make the title happen. So not only is this movie doing a moon landing conspiracy, a grey goo scenario, a hollow moon conspiracy, a virtual simulation conspiracy, and an ancient aliens conspiracy, it's ripping off Superman and Brainiac, Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back, Majora's Mask, and the "sophisticated aliens digitize their brains into a white ball and come to Earth to escape a universe-level threat that we're going to fight in the cancelled two-part sequel" plot from Independence Day: Resurgence. Oh, and because Emmerich likes Lexus money, Harper's ex-wife is married to Paul Rudd...'s rambling comic relief from Ant-Man, who owns a Lexus dealership so they have a product placement reason to reuse the chasm jump from 2012 and hype up the car's alternative speed mode like it's the NOS button in a Fast & Furious movie instead of a glorified automatic gearshift. Also, there's a second ticking clock narrative here because no "good" Emmerich movie would be complete without the military chomping at the bit to unsuccessfully solve the problem with nuclear weapons.

Let me get this out of the way, even though I'm almost done with the review: Moonfall is by no means a boring movie. Even when there's just dialogue, it's fun and spectacular to look at (if obviously fake in that "let's give The Asylum a billion dollars" kind of way that made Resurgence look bad), entertainingly stupid, succeeds at making the moon look like a genuine, looming threat, and has its triumphant moments. But with the lack of any investment potential with regard to character relationships (the closest the movie comes is some weak suggestive banter between the nanny and Harper's long-haired, character-handsome son - whose name is Sonny because when you aren't going to try, make it really obvious - and getting Harper and his ex-wife back together by asphyxiating Michael Peña offscreen) or global scale collateral damage (it's all fake, and nobody in the movie seems to care, either), it's an empty, soulless fun, which ultimately isn't that fun at all. Fuck the moon.

F+

While you're waiting for that musical (which is due out the same time as the Batgirl movie, Independence Day 3 & 4, and Moonfall 2 & 3), please remember to Become A Ticketholder because you haven't already, comment your favorite Roland Emmerich movie at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can watch a good movie again for once in my life, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my lunatic content.

Ticketmaster,

Out.