Movie Review: Moonfall

 

Michael's Movie Grade: F

A bottom of the barrel sci-fi disaster flick. 

Roland Emmerich has made quite a few movies about the Earth coming to an end and unlikely heroes having to save the day (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012). However, this is definitely his weakest go around in this department. It is a complete and utter failure through and through. It commits the ultimate sin for a disaster movie. That is that it is boring. Every plot point and character feel like something we have seen before in Emmerich's previous films of this nature. Simply put this feels like a complete rehash. However, each of these plot points and characters are completely stripped of anything that made them work in the previous movies and simply come off as boring here. The characters are so stereotyped that they feel like they belong in a parody of a disaster movie instead of an actual one. The storyline feels like it is simply going through the motions, and this makes it impossible to have any emotional connection to. The humor is incredibly forced and unfunny. There is not an intentional laugh in this movie (we will get to the unintentional ones later). While Roland Emmerich's previous movies of this type have their faults, I cannot think of one that actually bored me until this film.

While being boring is a fault for much of this film, I will say it does not apply to all of it. As the movie approaches the end, it decides to go completely insane as if the filmmakers simply stopped caring. All attempts to tell something resembling a cohesive narrative simply go out the window. The film takes a plot twist that is so bizarre and nonsensical that I simply stared at the movie screen in utter disbelief. Soon I was trying to hold back my laughter so anyone else in the cinema didn't think I was crazy. For all the failed attempts at humor earlier in the movie, I found myself having a hard time not breaking into laughter when the movie turned deadly serious. While I try not to give any spoilers in these reviews, I am not sure I could describe this if I wanted to give spoilers. Because there are no words that can describe this kind of nonsense. As terrible and insane as the last act of this movie was, I kind of wish the rest of the movie was more like this because at least it is preferable to the sheer boredom of the rest of the movies. 

I did not except a good movie going in but I am in utter disbelief at how bad this was.