Moonfall (2022)

***/****
starring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser & Spenser Cohen
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw Between The Day After Tomorrow and the new Moonfall, Roland Emmerich has become our unlikely climate disaster Tierisius: Oedipus’s blind seer, dispensing fair warning to a population not paying any attention. In the earlier film, global warming causes a new Ice Age and an exodus of American refugees looking for sanctuary in Mexico, while Moonfall sees the entire west coast flooded and essentially everyone at sea level in the United States trying to get to Colorado. Both ideas are ripe with satiric irony, animated with a sense of gallows humour about how extraordinarily shortsighted American leadership is in the face of obvious signs and portents. Oh, and science, of course, which should have been enough once the evidence of our own eyes somehow proved inadequate. Even Moonfall‘s ultimate revelation–something about AI and space arks and a running gag about Elon Musk–speaks brilliantly, however intentionally, to our primate desire to conflate the hoarding of generational wealth with genius, when all the wealthy really want to do is escape the rapidly-changing planet they’ve strip-mined for its resources. All that, plus a broad redux of H.G. Wells’s The First Men In the Moon, and, kids, we got ourselves the smart and unpretentious version of Don’t Look Up.

The basic plot happens to be the very definition of a basic plot. Disgraced astronaut Harper (Patrick Wilson) is so disgraced because during a spacewalk from a shuttle ten years in the past, something weird happened and someone got dead. This became somehow his fault, and since that mission’s commander, Fowler (Halle Berry), was unconscious at the time, she proves to be a lousy material witness at the astronaut trial. Welp, it turns out Harper was right: that a sentient nanobot tentacle coming out of the moon was the real culprit, and it’s back, suckas. And now, spoiler alert, the moon is falling. Because of other “science,” the moon is also expanding, meaning the closer it gets to Earth, the greater its gravity becomes, thus making the Earth’s gravity lighter and therefore… Therefore nothing. Moonfall is delightfully, deliriously moronic, up to and including the glorious moment where someone trying to lift an entire tree off of someone shouts, “Don’t worry! The moon will help us!”…and then, by golly, it does. That’s right. On one level, Moonfall is just fucking awful–the kind of loud, obnoxious, effects-ridden spectacle that used to occupy the space that Disney has sucked all the air out of–the kind of movie that, not driven by a parasocial nostalgia cult, boasted of precious few people addlepated enough to champion it for a Best Picture nomination. Needless to say, Harper is brought back into the fold, and he, Fowler, and Houseman (John Bradley), a portly, Nick Frost-ian conspiracy-theorist-who-is-right sidekick (see also: the Bryan Tyree Henry character from Godzilla vs. Kong), fly a vintage shuttle up to Armageddon the shit out of, yes, the moon.

Lest you fear I’m missing the point, the pleasures of Moonfall are its heedless–joyful, even–disdain for exposition in favour of high melodrama, its broken families acting as foreground to the moon falling, giant disaster sequences involving the Pacific reclaiming L.A., and, yes, even a Waterworld sequence with a hostile Aspen settlement where a literal “Karen” acts exactly like a pejorative Karen. The movie’s pleasures are also in how it isn’t that far-fetched in comparison to this broken reality of ours, in which the kind of people who believe the moon is hollow and birds are fake number in the millions and are in charge of redistricting, school boards, and the Supreme Court. With news of unprecedented weather events wiping out entire communities practically every other week, Emmerich’s depiction of the end of the world is only one magnification north of reality. I do take a certain pleasure, I confess, in seeing a digital model fall just as predicted, should our politicians not take serious countermeasures…decades ago. Moonfall is “I told you so” on a grand scale, a validation of all my paranoia and feelings of impending doom, all my total disillusionment with my fellow humans and our commodified world. And then, at the end of it, it offers a vision of a holodeck Heaven, complete with loved ones reconstituted from our downloaded memories, because Moonfall isn’t nihilistic apocalypse: it’s a post-humanistic one in which we’re going to die, it’s true, but, like the advanced culture wiped from the universe by a mad Christian God in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star,” we’re destined to leave a hollowed-out rock’s worth of artifacts like Moonfall as our, if not best legacy, at least our truest one.