Moonfall Review: Bad Moon Rising

"Moonfall" principally concerns three leads, each with chips on their shoulder regarding the vastness of space. There's former best friends Jo (Halle Berry) and Brian (Patrick Wilson), who worked together at NASA ten years ago before an encounter on a routine mission with what can best be described as a unidentified malevolent force took the lives of their colleagues and ravaged their friendship, along with Bryan's career. Bryan saw something outlandish out there, but Jo was incapacitated at the time, and wouldn't back him up when others insisted the catastrophe was little more than man-made error. A decade later, Jo is a high-ranking NASA official with a divorce under her belt, and Bryan is a drunk nobody with a divorce under his belt and a son who doesn't respect him (Charlie Plummer.) 

But the film's real hero is K.C. (John Bradley), a crackpot conspiracy theorist who is the first to discover that the moon's orbital trajectory is out of whack. He's also a "megastructurist," someone who believes the moon — really all moons — is a hollow vessel created by advanced human life. Together this unlikely trio has to figure out how to stop the moon from circling closer and closer to Earth and prevent all the extravagant, apocalyptic side effects of such a horrifying anomaly. 

What this means is that for the film's first act, it awkwardly mirrors a less funny version of "Don't Look Up." with the government trying to ignore what's going on before inevitably moving to, you know, nuke the moon. While the intrigue surrounding what is going on with the moon is fun enough, and the mystery about the mysterious swarms of black nanites emanating from one of its craters proves genuinely compelling, all the film's human drama feels bland and hard to care about. Wilson and Berry do their best to make up for underwritten characters, while Bradley tries his hardest to make up for the tragedy of not being Simon Pegg. But the cast is skint compared to the outsized ensembles a good disaster picture needs to function.

Ideally each of the B-plots and supporting players are diverse and rely on a variety of interesting character actors to make up for the storytelling efficiency needed to drive one of these movies forward. But here, Wilson and Berry's arcs are too similar, and there aren't really any notable background characters to speak of, other than Michael Peña as Bryan's ex-wife's new husband and Kelly Yu as a foreign exchange student. But where the film's main plot fails, outside of its threadbare characterization, is in its pacing. 

"Independence Day," arguably Emmerich's best work, runs close to 2.5 hours, while this one runs just over two. Normally, a leaner picture could be a good thing, but "Moonfall" moves a little too quickly at times, awkwardly stitching exposition to unfunny comic relief with no room for the emotional beats to breathe or for the escalation of the global carnage to land. It's a big movie that nonetheless feels smaller than its $140 million budget by virtue of not effectively showing the world at its proper scale. The entire purpose of seeing a movie this "epic" is to showcase the grandeur of the big screen, and while its larger moments definitely warrant the theatrical experience, its more intimate moments feel too much like television. 

Throughout its runtime, "Moonfall" just feels like a pale imitation of something Emmerich might have made 20 years ago. But luckily, it has just enough magic in it to keep from feeling like a waste of time.