Moonfall review: A profoundly ridiculous disaster film

Dir: Roland Emmerich. Starring: Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Michael Pena, Charlie Plummer, Kelly Yu, Donald Sutherland. 12A, 130 minutes.

Moonfall might be the first film that dares to ask the question: what if the moon fell? It is, unsurprisingly, profoundly ridiculous, though you’ve probably already come to that conclusion. Characters talk about the moon in ways that increasingly suggest that it, much like New York in every middle-class drama, might be its own character. Sentiments about it range from “f*** the moon” to “the moon is going to help us!”

When it does, indeed, start to fall, the rising tides wash over cities in a way that’s typical of its director, disaster king Roland Emmerich (think The Day After Tomorrow or Godzilla). Less typical is the skewed effect of gravity that forces everyone to bounce around like they’re trapped in a planet-wide inflatable castle. There’s plenty of intercut news footage, too, as stone-faced presenters make sweeping declarations like “looting has become a favourite pastime in the United Kingdom”. Would you have expected anything else from Moonfall? At this point, you either surrender to the surface pleasures of Emmerich’s grand, American daydream – bombast and all – or you simply steer clear.

Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson play Jocinda Fowler and Brian Harper, astronauts involved in a disastrous mission that ends with a death toll and Brian’s highly publicised dismissal. He’s charged with negligence but swears something extraterrestrial played havoc with the ship. Jocinda, who was unconscious for most of it, doesn’t believe him. Several years later, a conspiracy theorist/amateur scientist KC Houseman (John Bradley) covertly acquires data proving that the moon is charting off course, which co-aligns with his own theories about what exactly is happening inside the Earth’s satellite – something both too good to spoil and far too nonsensical to coherently explain.

Of course, there’s a government cover-up to expose, which allows Berry, with the absolute sincerity of an Oscar winner, to deliver the line: “I work for the American people and you’re keeping them in the dark”. Perhaps it’s worth questioning why Emmerich still clings so stubbornly to the heroising of conspiracy theorists, particularly at this point in history, but it’s ultimately quite hard to read malice into a film that – and this can’t be said enough – is based entirely around the idea of the moon falling. When she meets with the military, Jocinda doesn’t even have to ask what their plan is. Of course they’re going to nuke the moon. Will the radioactive fallout wipe out the entire human population? Sure, but when the moon is misbehaving, the only recourse is to nuke it.

The job of saving the world inevitably comes down to the conspiracy theorist and the two astronauts, one disgraced and the other randomly promoted to the directorship of Nasa when her boss simply gives up on the moon and runs. By far the most tedious aspect of Moonfall is that, as all these Emmerich films go, these heroes are inevitably burdened with an assortment of blandly characterised family members. We must follow these earth-bound humans, too, as they dodge moon bandits and hop between bits of floating earth like they’re Rayman. Brian is, at first, reluctant to help Jocinda stop the moon from falling because his wayward son (Charlie Plummer) has just been jailed for joyriding. She is forced to remind him that the moon falling should probably take priority. It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. And it’s exactly as absurd as you could ever hope it would be.