Moonfall (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

Don't Look Up told a parodical story of a real -- if vague -- fear of celestial bodies destroying Earth. It killed off the dinosaurs, right? So obviously we'll be next. And we've seen similarly inspired stories before, from Disney's Dinosaur to Lars von Trier's Melancholia, obviously each with a rather different tone. Rarely has the moon been the body meant to cause destruction (with a clear exception in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for you gamers), so naturally it was about time. What with the US Space Force being a fairly new thing, it's amazing we haven't seen more movies like this. Well, other than 2020's Greenland, which I will maintain is among the dazzling best of the disaster genre.

In what starts as a fairly cool idea, the latest disaster flick suggests that the moon is falling out of orbit and on a spinning collision course with us. The science -- or, I guess, as someone who doesn't know physics, the "science" -- involved is fascinating, as Earth's gravity gets increasingly chaotic. What starts as global tidal waves becomes more tectonic as land masses buckle and entire cities picked up and smashed on each progressive lunar revolution. It's a cool concept, and frankly the scenes of mass destruction are really entertaining in a way only Roland Emmerich has ever really mastered.

Emmerich has made a career out of destroying the world, or at least messing it up pretty badly, and it's usually a lot of fun! Moonfall isn't an exception to the rule, and it's a typical mix of effective thrills and overproduced hooey, flavored by that delightful sci-fi "what if" suggestibility. From Independence Day to 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, and from 10,000 BC to even Anonymous (by far my favorite of his work), he takes conspiracy theories -- or at least the idea of major existential theories -- and turns them into thrillers about mass destruction and rewriting history. Emmerich knows how to tell these stories and what audiences want visually from them, and so he usually delivers it pretty darn well, like painting the apocalypse in a wine and canvas event for his drunk and amateur friends.

The problem is usually with his writers, which often includes himself. Moonfall is a profoundly stupid film on the page, which is probably why the "master of disaster" had to independently produce this enormously-budgeted flick. What could have been a cool story about a natural disaster is warped into one of the most aggressively weird sci-fi trips since Interstellar, and I don't say that as a good comparison point. SPOILER ALERT: it's basically "Transformers" (although I know nothing about that franchise, it almost certainly fits), where the moon is a hollow shell meant to safeguard and repopulate humanity as necessary, and it is now under assault by a swarm of Artificial Intelligence machines intending to eliminate humanity. I told you this shit got weird fast.

Whatever cutesy dynamic Godzilla vs. Kong embraced in its conspiracy theorist and sidekick geek character is largely recreated here in a character played by Game of Throne's John Bradley. He's always thought the moon was a megastructure, and his combined joy and horror at discovering its displacement is a bit infectious. His initial alarmist proclamations fall on deaf ears (I told you this felt like a companion piece to Don't Look Up) and so he leaks the deets to the media before NASA finally takes him seriously and calculates less than a month before collision. The military wants to nuke the moon, but for various illogical reasons they decide first to send more astronauts up there to find out what's going on (nevermind the earlier mysterious deaths and impending death of Earth). Who do they send? Space partners Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson, because frankly nobody's character name matters.

There's a lot of wasted time on the personal lives of these characters, whose melodrama is forced and unsatisfying. Wilson's son (Charlie Plummer) is trouble, as is his estranged wife and daughters, who now live with Michael Pena's character; Berry's son has a foreign exchange babysitter (Kelly Yu); Bradley's aging mother barely remembers him, despite his having a cat memorably named Fuzz Aldrin. The dynamics of these characters are frighteningly flat, despite hard work from Bradley and average work from the other leads (except for the always amazing Donald Sutherland, who shows up for exactly one very creepy and unnecessary and unnecessarily creepy scene). Could their universally one-note characterizations -- caricaturizations? -- simply be Emmerich's latent nihilism manifesting, even as a strange campy misanthropy? Possibly, and that interpretive lens would make another screening fascinating, if I cared enough to do that.

While its premise is great (the moon, falling; I just can't get enough of that), its story is shit, and its acting ain't where it's at, Moonfall also boasts some of the strangest effects I've seen in months. Compare the effects of this with Emmerich's most recent film, Midway, and you'll see what I mean. Many scenes of this film, by comparison, are clearly sound stages, especially during the climax as multiple characters race along a winding snowy road to a safe bunker in Aspen, Colorado. It's almost laughable, if it weren't meant to be so serious; some of the special effects are pretty great here, as gravity is in a constant state of flux, but the backgrounds don't match the action. Even earlier, often something cataclysmic is happening in the backgrounds and the characters seem quite bored, indifferent, or ignorant in the foreground. So if you're here for the drama or the storytelling, save your money and time. If you're here for a zany, eccentric filmmaker entertaining his own fever dream, buckle up and settle in. It's a bumpy ride.

Midway (2019)

Score: 4 / 5

I'm a sucker for war movies, and even more a sucker for Roland Emmerich. And Midway is not a disappointment.

A two-and-a-half hour war thriller that basically spans the Pacific naval activities during WWII, the film considers its central battle -- The Battle of Midway, obviously -- in terms of its context. It does so at great risk; we've been programmed into iconic, intense, and isolated microcosms of these wars in cinema, and so working hard (and in such a long film) to contextualize the climactic conflict is dramatically dangerous. With the helpful use of onscreen text with dates and locations, we get carried along from the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor to the Tokyo Raid the next year and finally to the titular three-day conflict of air and sea.

Because it's Emmerich, there's a lot you can accurately predict about this movie. Let's dive into a few. One: It primarily concerns men, and all but wastes Mandy Moore. Two: Nobody is really given enough drama to shine in their roles. The men seem like they're doing their best to carry on the tradition of stoic, heroic war movies: strong chins, strange hair on their heads and face, they seem intent only on serving their country and giving their best tough man impressions to the camera. Three: The plot flies along so quickly that I'm sure I heard groans from history buffs in the audience. But it's never less than entertaining, and certainly could never be accused of being boring.

Four, and perhaps most objectionable to some: It's drowning in special effects. As one of the most expensive independent movies ever made, Midway already demanded a sizable budget. Add to it the aerial dogfights, a submarine with torpedoes, and fleets of ships on open water in open war and what else could he have done? Emmerich doesn't necessarily go for broke with the calculated immersion of Nolan's Dunkirk, but he clearly learned a few great ideas from the master filmmaker. This movie is cast mostly in stark, bluish daylight and features an incredible soundscape that makes you feel the urgency of what's onscreen. While the screenplay and performances largely feel like they're more in-tune with WWII movies than WWII itself, the visuals and editing are full-on Emmerich at his dizzying, spectacular best. Then the planes dive hundreds of yards in a flurry of exploding fireworks, you can hardly help but hold your breath and grip your armrests.

Finally, and most importantly, it's just a lot of fun; at least, if you consider eye-popping battle sequences at sea entertaining. Emmerich may get criticized for his blockbuster, CGI aesthetic, but damned if he doesn't know exactly what he's doing. It's all a bunch of gorgeous billowing smoke, fire blazing, and water splashing. We might have hoped for a bit more real-life drama (not like the artificial romance of Pearl Harbor) since, after all, the characters here are apparently based on real-life soldiers, unlike in the 1976 film of the same name. The few moments of real intrigue are largely skated over, including James Doolittle (Aaron Eckhart) landing in China after bombing Tokyo. But this is no historical treatise, and Emmerich knows we're here for the action. For a rousing war movie that depicts both sides of the conflict but accurately champions the heroes -- Emmerich is many things, but always a sentimentalist -- you couldn't do much better than Midway.