Moonfall (2022) Review
3/10
The moon leaves its orbit and begins falling toward Earth. A disgraced astronaut, a NASA administrator who was on the same mission, and a conspiracy theorist who was right are the only people who can do anything about it. The 3 is for a film that’s exactly what it says and executes about a third of it competently. The disaster sequences are enormous and legible, the physics are nonsense the film isn’t embarrassed about, and the human material is so poor it becomes difficult to sit through.
I wanted to have more fun with this than I did. Put the moon over Los Angeles and pull the tides straight up and I’m happy for a while, but every time the film cut back to the family drama I could feel it stall, and by the end I resented the people for getting in the way of the disaster.
Its real interest is financial. Emmerich couldn’t get a studio to fund it, raised the money independently, and the resulting loss is the clearest available demonstration of what happens when spectacle is the only thing on offer.
The Disaster Material Works
Emmerich has been doing this for thirty years and the parts he’s good at are still good. The moon appears above a city, tides go vertical, gravity fails in waves, and a car chase happens with debris falling upward. The physical logic of the set pieces is internally consistent even when the science is absurd. Gravity increases as the moon approaches, so the film shows water climbing, vehicles lifting and people becoming unable to run, and it applies those rules consistently.
That’s more than most disaster films manage. The rules are stated, the consequences follow, and the audience can anticipate what will go wrong in a given location.
The tsunami is the best of them, and it’s the scene I’d point to if anyone asked what Emmerich still does well. The water comes up as a wall, pulled skyward by an object overhead. That’s an unfamiliar image and the film holds on it long enough for it to register. The scale is also impressive on a large screen. A moon filling the sky over Los Angeles is an image that doesn’t require any dialogue to work and the film supplies several versions of it.
Absurd premises survive if the internal rules are consistent. The science here’s nonsense and the consequences of that nonsense are applied rigorously. That’s all an audience requires. The failure mode is a story that changes its own rules when the plot needs a different outcome. State the rule and then let the reader predict. A audience that can anticipate the next disaster is engaged, and one that’s only being surprised is passive.
Spectacle is a legitimate thing to build a work around and it can’t be the only thing. This film shows the ceiling.
Nobody in It Is a Person
Patrick Wilson plays a disgraced astronaut, Halle Berry plays a NASA administrator, John Bradley plays a conspiracy theorist, and each of them is a single trait with a problem attached. The estranged son subplot is the film’s worst material and it eats a considerable amount of time. A teenager is angry at his father, gets arrested, gets released, drives across the country, and none of it affects the moon. I’d have cut every minute of it and not missed a thing. That’s the structural error. Every human scene is disconnected from the disaster, so the film alternates between something enormous happening and something small happening that’s no relationship to it.
Compare the way a good disaster film links the two. A character with a useful skill, a fixed location and a direct relationship to the event means every personal scene is also a plot scene, and this film has almost none of that.
John Bradley is the exception and the film treats him as comic relief. KC Houseman is a conspiracy theorist who was correct, works as a janitor at a museum, has a mother in a care home and calculated the orbital decay before anybody at NASA did, and all of that is played for laughs until the third act needs him.
The Megastructure
The third act reveals that the moon is artificial, hollow, built by ancestors of humanity, and contains an artificial intelligence that’s been maintaining it. That’s a large idea and the film isn’t equipped to handle it. The reveal is delivered in an exposition sequence lasting several minutes, the implications are enormous, and the picture responds by having a spacecraft fly down a tunnel. There’s a version of this film that takes the idea seriously. The discovery that the moon is a machine built by people who preceded us, and that something has been living in it, could carry a whole picture on its own. Emmerich uses it as a location for a chase.
The film lost me for good when Emmerich threw away a hollow moon built by our ancestors, the most interesting idea in the picture, on a tunnel chase. That waste bothered me more than any of the bad dialogue. The swarm that attacks is also undercooked. A nanotech intelligence that consumes technological civilizations is an interesting antagonist and it’s rendered as a black cloud that moves toward things.
Its one rule is that it’s attracted to technology, which the film states and then applies inconsistently. A threat that sometimes follows its own logic and sometimes doesn’t is a threat the audience stops trying to anticipate.
You’ll waste a large idea introduced in the third act unless you built the structure to receive it. Reveals need somewhere to land. If your best concept arrives at minute ninety and gets ten minutes of screen time, it was your premise and you built the wrong film in front of it.
Test the reveal by asking what changes. If the characters proceed with the same plan they had before, the revelation was decoration. An abstract antagonist needs one specific behavior the audience can hold. A cloud that consumes technology is a concept, and a cloud that does one memorable thing is a monster.
The Money
Emmerich couldn’t get a studio to finance it and raised around a hundred and forty million independently. That makes it one of the most expensive independently funded films ever made. It took roughly sixty-seven million worldwide. The reported loss was severe enough to be discussed as a case study, and the production company behind it was significantly affected.
That outcome is worth stating plainly because it’s the clearest data point available about the limits of spectacle. This is a competently mounted disaster film with recognizable actors and enormous set pieces, released into a market that didn’t want it.
It also arrived in February 2022, into cinemas that were still recovering. That’s a real mitigating factor and not a sufficient one. Plenty of other films released that same year found their audiences without difficulty. Emmerich’s own position afterward was that audiences had moved to franchise properties and that an original disaster film could no longer find one. That’s a self-serving explanation and it’s also largely correct.
The counterargument is that Independence Day was original too, and it worked, and the difference isn’t the market. Audiences will show up for something they haven’t seen before if the people in it are worth an hour of attention, and that hasn’t changed. An original disaster film is a gamble worth cheering, so this failure stings. Emmerich had the freedom and the money, and he still gave the best part to the moon.
Where It Sits
Independence Day worked because it had characters people could name, jokes that landed, and a structure where personal stakes and global ones were the same stakes. This has none of that and it’s not for want of budget. The difference is entirely in the writing, and in whether the people on screen have anything to do with the thing happening to the planet.
What the film is good for is one kind of viewing. It’s enormous, it’s not boring, the science is gleefully wrong, and it makes no claim to be anything else.
A 3 instead of lower reflects that honesty. It’s not pretending, it’s not cynical in the way a rights-holding exercise is cynical, and somebody wanted to put the moon in the sky over a city and did. Donald Sutherland appears in one scene, in a wheelchair, delivering exposition about a 1969 cover-up, and it’s the last thing of his I saw before his death. He’s better than the scene and the scene is better for having him in it.
Scale can’t substitute for connection. The reader has to care about a person before the destruction of a city means anything, and that’s a writing problem instead of a budget problem. Every disaster story that works ties one character’s specific want to the event itself.
Sincerity is worth something even in failure. A work that wanted to exist reads differently from one produced to satisfy an obligation, and readers can tell. When your premise is the selling point, deliver it early and often. A film about the moon falling should have the moon falling in the first ten minutes, and this one largely does.
Should you watch Moonfall?
Only for the spectacle, and only if you can put up with everything between the spectacle. I enjoyed the vertical tides and the moon filling the sky, and I resented nearly every scene with people in it, so it gets a 3. A hundred and forty million dollars of independent money went into proving that big images can’t save a film whose humans are this thin, and I think that’s a damn shame for a premise this silly and this promising.
