Moonfall

This is so heavenly stupid that it's kind of beautiful. This movie is about 60 years late, and that's actually a good thing. I felt like I was watching vintage sci-fi from the 1950s again, only that Roland goes much, much further with the stupidity. In the 1950s, during the Golden Age of science fiction, these pieces were made like Bata's trainers, nothing makes sense to today's viewer, but you still have fun and smile because you can feel the sincere effort to make a good film. Probably like Edward D. Wood Jr. when he was hanging models of flying saucers on string, Roland has the technical side of the craft down pat, but the boys are on the same page in terms of message. Emmerich is a genre on his own. I don’t want to watch it again, but it was a guilty pleasure. (04/02/2022)

In Moonfall, there is not even a trace of anything that made last year’s The Tomorrow War, a B-movie in the same genre, so great (inventive work with clichés, sincere emotions, nice visual stylization). Emmerich disappeared into a black hole. This can’t be his movie. Or maybe he's just realizing that he has nothing left to say after 2012. An Asylum screenplay with an A-list cast. I still can’t believe that I saw Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry reciting that dialogue. (02/03/2022)

Yesterday I was in Apollo 10 1/2, today it’s the regular Apollo 11... Emmerich destroys a planet again in a similar way, but this time he does it a bit differently. Perhaps everything is a bit more laid back here and the destruction isn’t as opulent as in his previous disaster hits like 2012 or the climatic The Day After Tomorrow. This time round, the destruction somehow takes a back seat. The main things here are the journey to the center of the Moon and the mystery of the Dyson Sphere, entertaining mucking about involving a cloud and a decrepit space shuttle, family values and great lines. It’s a hair’s breadth worse than the other Emmerich movies to date, but it’s still good entertainment for two hours, during which your brain can get some rest. (04/03/2022)

A mix of Independence Day and 2012, but it can’t hold a candle to either. Sure, this is primarily light entertainment, or classic Emmerich, if you will, though even lighter than usual because it’s worse than even Godzilla in character work, dialogue and level of stupidity, and that's saying a hell of a lot. Surprisingly, even the visual effects flourishes don't dazzle to any extreme, and the once so inventive wizard has fallen into the average green screen, where he greases up one unimaginative make-up scene after another. What would Elon do? I'm sure he wouldn't have made this occasionally funny travesty. (05/15/2022)

Since Moonfall's script could not have been devised by even the most consummate conspiracy theorist, there can be no doubt that the filmmakers are not serious. In my opinion, this is a deliberate contribution to the category of not perhaps intentionally stupid, but logic-ignoring and the most insane fear-mongering B-movies of the 50s, 60s or 70s, which pretended to be serious, but were mainly concerned with entertaining the audience and packing cinemas. This is exactly the feeling I had, much stronger than in all of Emmerich's previous efforts. I like his work, but the films that stand out interestingly are 10,000 BC and Midway, which I liked the least by far. Why? Because Emmerich wanted to deliver a serious story on the one hand and a big visual effects spectacle on the other, but the combination didn't work. At the same time, a serious story without lavish effects can certainly be made (The Patriot, Anonymous) as well as overblown visual effects spectacles that don't take themselves seriously, whether they're about saving or destroying our world or another, or just a proper 80s school action flick (the, in my opinion, underrated White House Down). This time he dispensed with the need for any seriousness altogether, coming up with a wacky but really unorthodox plot that allowed him to destroy a bit more and differently than what and how he had been destroying so far. The plot is heavily condensed, a couple of days go by without warning between several scenes, during which something important happens that other films would spend more time on, and meanwhile the giant moon is approaching the Earth, constantly rising and setting, doing doggy stunts with gravity that make many scenes really crazy and funny. For example, the naivety with which they travel back and forth from Earth and solve individual problems is almost Meliés-like. You watch it with a smile, see how nice it looks, enjoy the truly original design of the monster... If I like the naive films that this reminded me of, then I have no reason not to like Moonfall. (02/04/2022)