Official Website

Plot Summary: The world stands on the brink of annihilation when a mysterious force knocks the moon from its orbit and sends it hurtling toward a collision course with Earth. With only weeks before impact, NASA executive Jocinda "Jo" Fowler teams up with a man from her past and a conspiracy theorist for an impossible mission into space to save humanity.

Director: Roland Emmerich

Writers: Spenser Cohen, Roland Emmerich, and Harold Kloser

Runtime: 2 hours

Main Cast:

• Halle Berry as Jo Fowler
• Patrick Wilson as Brian Harper
• John Bradley as KC Houseman
• Michael Peña as Tom Lopez
• Donald Sutherland as Holdenfield

Review by: Small Couch Reviews

If you have seen the trailer for “MoonFall,” then this movie is exactly what you think it is- except much worse.  The latest from director/writer Roland Emmerich is a pacing and storytelling nightmare that is so bad, we are actually considering re-watching Independence Day to see if it is actually good, or just something we remember as a good time from childhood. That is not to say every single thing in this movie is poorly executed (just most of it); at times, the movie is a marvel to look upon. There are certain visuals that stand out in this movie and some scenes rendered so beautifully, you actually wish you could freeze and capture the shot on screen. Unfortunately, that alone is not worth the price of admission, and “MoonFall” is one to skip.

Tweet

What We Liked:

“Moonfall” tells the story of a team of astronauts and scientists who discover that the moon has changed its orbit and is drawing closer to Earth. They also discover that this is not a natural phenomenon as some unknown force is causing the moon to change its orbital pattern. So, it’s up to this team to get to the moon and figure out what is going on.

Roland Emmerich knows how to direct disaster. As the moon gets closer to Earth, the chaos it causes is pretty amazing from a visual perspective. There are shots that show the epic scale of the destruction being caused and for the most part, it works. There are some moments when it is incredibly obvious a green screen is being used, but those moments are scant. There is a scene during the climax when pieces of the moon fall and crash upon the Earth- those minutes are what we will remember most from this film as the visuals were on par with a movie like 2021’s “Dune.”

What We Didn’t Like:

This could be a very long write-up and read discussing all the issues with this film. However, the most egregious offenses of this film are the script and the pacing. The pacing has an interesting duality because it is both extremely rushed but scenes also drag on much longer than necessary. So, we meet the main character, portrayed by Patrick Wilson, a NASA astronaut who first sees this phenomenon on the moon at the very beginning of the film. In the next 35-40 minutes we meet his wife and his son, see him terminated from employment, disgraced publicly, betrayed by a close friend, divorced, and being asked to lead an expedition to the moon. Seem like a lot? It was, and there was no time given to any character for development. It’s almost as if the writers believed that by placing the words “10 years later” on screen, that meant they could skip developing the relationships between characters and the personalities of characters. It most certainly does not mean that and honestly hurts this movie tremendously because you feel no attachment to the characters so you really do not care about their personal struggles.

That leads to the bigger problem- the writing. There were too many scenes that were clearly trying to draw emotion, but 1) because no time was taken to develop the characters you do not care about their issues because you cannot relate/understand them 2) because the script was so basic the actors were given no help in trying to make the audience believe they were real people. This is the first movie in a long while in which we were aware, the entire time, that we were watching something being acted out on screen- it does not draw you in at all. Characters speak in ways that no human would ever speak to another human; it is worse than sitcoms. Early on in the movie, Halle Berry’s character has a phone conversation with her husband that is so badly scripted, it’s almost cringe-worthy. If you were to watch the scene with no context, it would be difficult to determine if he was angry, joking, or asking for forgiveness.

We would like to blame the actors for giving bad performances- because they were horrendous across the board. In particular, the three leads Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, and Halle Berry especially seemed to act down to the level of the cast around them- but the fact that these three are tried and proven must mean they either had a bad script or bad direction.