
(For Day 14 of NaPoWriMo, the prompt was to write a satire based on a famous poem. I went back to my old habit of rewriting song lyrics and poked fun at this absurd disaster film. This one is best sung to the tune of Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore.”)
When the moon hits your eye,
That’s a rock from the sky,
So it’s fatal.
When the crust starts to crack
Like it’s under attack,
Oh, it’s fatal.
This event
And the moon’s descent
From the firmament
Will prevent your survival.
Meteors
(And the poison gas
That the earth will pass)
Will announce its arrival.
When the satellites fall
Like they’ve chugged alcohol,
Then it’s fatal.
When a big bolide arcs,
Aiming for our landmarks,
Then you’re dead.
If you think you can hide,
When disaster’s worldwide,
You’re unable.
Things that people live through
In the movies you view
Would be fatal!
____________________________
MPA rating: PG-13
To paraphrase Michael Caine’s Alfred in The Dark Knight, some men just want to watch the world burn or flood or freeze or get hit by the moon. Clearly Roland Emmerich is one of those people since he’s made a career off of different ways to cause cataclysmic damage to as much of the planet Earth as possible. Instead of the tectonic upheaval of 2012 or the climatic turmoil of The Day After Tomorrow, he looked up to imagine what would happen if the moon were to come crashing down to the earth, with an extraterrestrial threat as the catalyst. It’s pure turn-your-brain-off destruction with a huge cast of mostly expendable characters to witness it, and it might have been less of a box-office bomb if it didn’t feel like such a rehash of his previous films.

The story mainly centers on astronauts Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry), as well as K.C. Houseman (John Bradley), a megastructurist researcher with apparently crackpot theories about the moon that are inevitably proven right. The three of them become the driving force to go into space and use an EMP against the alien force degrading the moon’s orbit, even as CGI havoc is unleashed on the planet to plague Brian’s son (Charlie Plummer), Jocinda’s son, Jocinda’s son’s nanny, Jocinda’s ex-husband, Brian’s ex-wife, Brian’s ex-wife’s new husband (Michael Peña), and the rest of the humans unlucky enough to live in an Emmerich film.
No one should expect too much out of this kind of cheesy disaster film beyond cool, destructive visuals and a generic happy ending with at least someone surviving, and Moonfall delivers on that promise. Along with some neat sci-fi concepts, it has the familiar Emmerich absurdity of a car chase with mayhem affecting everything but the heroes’ car, as well as nonsensical moon danger where it doesn’t even seem to be orbiting the earth, just popping over the horizon to mess with gravity and then go away again. At over 2 hours, the film’s flimsy script and rickety logic overstay their welcome, and by the time the heroes are fleeing from the alien swarm in an alien spaceship, even the action had become strangely monotonous.

I like the production story of Emmerich saying “It’s just a movie” whenever the on-site astronaut advisor told him something wasn’t actually possible, which epitomizes Moonfall as a big-budget B-movie. While there’s nothing wrong with that brand of dumb fun, its final scene suggesting a sequel clearly thinks it’s better than it is.
Best line: (K.C.) “Are we dead?” (Brian) “No, we’re just inside the moon.” (K.C.) “That might be the greatest sentence anyone’s ever said.”
Rank: Honorable Mention
© 2023 S.G. Liput
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