Moonfall is the newest film by Roland Emmerich who you may remember from such films as Independence Day and the Day After Tomorrow and this movie sees Patrick Wilson play a former disgrace NASA astronaut who becomes the point of interest for a local conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) who believes the moon is starting to fall out of its natural orbit with the Earth and will soon crash into it but in order to try and stop it they will need NASAs help and maybe the US Defence department.
Moonfall was one of my most anticipated films of this year mainly because Roland Emmerich is a filmmaker that I am a near complete total sucker for, I love Independence Day and the Day After Tomorrow but recently I didn’t care for his Independence Day sequel Resurgence in 2016 or Midway his War film from early 2020 but would this be a case of It’s The End of the World as we Know it and I’ll have fun or more a case of seeing a Bad Moon Rising and trouble on the way.
Well happily this is a case of the former as I had a good amount of fun with this movie and while I was watching it I thought to myself “this has a real Independence Day meets the Day after Tomorrow” vibe to it and I enjoyed those films quite a bit and I enjoyed this film as well and had a good time watching it on a good sized cinema screen.
The disaster effects in this film first and foremost were a lot of fun combining the Sci-Fi aspect of Independence Day with the Natural Disaster element of the Day After Tomorrow but thankfully not getting too silly or overblown which crippled Emmerich’s 2012 film I felt, there were lots of cool wave effects, gravity shifts, a car chase, news stories that made me think of the last 2 years and even a segment of the film that reminded me of Return of the Jedi.
As for the performances well their mostly good, Patrick Wilson is an effective lead while Halle Berry is also pretty good as the chief NASA scientist who comes around to the crazy Moon theories, Donald Sutherland I enjoyed seeing in his brief role while Michael Pena, Charlie Plummer and Kelly Yu were good in their roles as well.
Where I think this film falls over sadly is in some of its Sci-Fi storytelling, Emmerich and his writers do a good enough job explaining why the Moon is doing what’s it doing in a very economical kind of a way but they try to add all this other stuff on top of it and it lost me a little bit and felt like the Emmerich of Independence Day: Resurgence where he tried to build this whole other thing on top of what was a simple and economical presence and it didn’t work not there and not here.
And so that was Moonfall and its good fun if you’re an Emmerich fan like I am but if your not I would sit this one out, 3 out of 5.
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