Moonfall is a moonfail
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s… not exciting enough
A quick poke around YouTube will turn up multiple computer-animated videos demonstrating what Earth’s sky would look like were the moon’s orbit significantly closer (or, say, were the planet instead orbited by a giant banana). Offering a more expensive, more spectacular, much dumber version of that hypothetical scenario, Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall imagines a global crisis in which a handful of courageous Americans (plus one expat Brit) must team up to prevent our natural satellite—which may not be so natural after all—from veering so close that it’ll be torn apart by Earth’s tidal forces and rain a zillion civilization-ending meteors down upon us. (That’s an actual phenomenon, triggered at a specific distance called the Roche limit—a rare instance of Moonfall being scientifically accurate. Interstellar this ain’t.) The film’s more or less a mashup of Emmerich’s two wheelhouses: alien contact (Stargate, Independence Day) and cataclysmic disasters (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), with some Armageddon thrown in for good measure. You will actually hear your brain cells commit seppuku as you watch it.
For no very good reason—a phrase that describes numerous aspects of this movie—Moonfall opens a decade ago, introducing astronauts Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) as they perform satellite maintenance. A barely seen object impacts the moon, sending debris flying and causing the death of a third astronaut who might as well have been wearing a red Star Trek uniform. Harper, who insists that he witnessed an intelligent entity, gets drummed out of NASA, only to be vindicated 10 years later when astronomers observe that the moon’s orbit has suddenly shifted, with the body now approaching Earth so rapidly that the next three months (as orbitally defined) will last only three weeks… at which point the moon will disintegrate.
As it inevitably turns out, Harper, who once successfully landed a spacecraft that had lost all power, is the only person qualified to save the world, though he’ll need the help of both Fowler, whose prior lack of support he resents, and an amateur astronomer and “mega-structuralist” named KC (John Bradley, best known as Samwell on Game Of Thrones).
KC’s a perfect example of how inept Moonfall can be even by the relatively low standards of big-budget popcorn fare. The character functions primarily as comic relief—he’s an excitable nerd—but also fills a standard disaster-movie role: the ordinary schmo who first spots some anomaly and struggles to get those in power to believe him. KC works as a university janitor, sneaking into professors’ offices and downloading satellite data, and he figures out on his own that the moon’s orbit has altered. (He also believes that the moon is artificial and hollow, but skip that for now.) “You knew all this was happening before NASA,” Harper marvels at one point.