Moonfall ★★

Roland Emmerich

Starring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Charlie Plummer, Yu Wenwen

Disaster movies are few and far between, but when one releases it is often predictable in plot and dialogue and features the protagonist doing something unimaginably impossible. This sure follows that genre trend! With last years Greenland changing up the expectations of the genre, showcasing the mental devastation instead of the physical destruction, you'd think that Roland Emmerich's Moonfall would try and learn from its mastery...but instead it reverts to the classic brain-switch-off stuff.

In actual fact, it was that brain-switch-off stuff that I was ready for. Janky dialogue, melodramatic performance and lack of plausibility is part of the disaster movie package, but things get super weird for no real reason and the science of the whole thing makes zero sense.

The film feels like it's moving in real time and I'm not even sure a moon every does fall, and with tonal shifts that are more jarring than Samwell Tarly (John Bradley as K.C.) saying things like Fuzz Aldrin, this sure is a recipe for disaster...and I haven't even mentioned the aliens.

All that being said, I did enjoy the initial set up of the film. It spends very little time setting up the world (which is a problem) but instead taps into the affect it would have on the world; this section explores ideas of riots, tidal changes and presidential buffoonery, but never do those moments become centre stage as they probably should. When you have films like Gravity taking space as seriously as it should be taken, it's difficult to get behind something that uses it as a gimmick. Halle Berry (who is in this by the way) takes things as seriously as she can, but even in some of her lines you sense the Oscar-winning actress is aware of the film's unapologetically lazy script.

With a confused message that seems to be 'if we listened to conspiracy theorists then all would be resolved', Moonfall doesn't rise anywhere before it's inevitable fall, and instead starts at the top of its game, then hurtles more and more towards the mess that it ultimately is. I had a great time!

Moonfall available in cinemas now