There are More Dignified Ways to Remember Donald Sutherland Than By Rerunning This Piece on the Monster-in-the-Moon Movie Moonfall But That's What We're Going With!
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The world can be a sick, sad, and terrifying place. It can feel like disappointment, rejection, and failure lurk around every corner. Sometimes, just getting up and facing life’s casual cruelty can take everything you have and more.
The world is terrifying and unknowable. That’s why we need movies about astronauts who go to the moon to kill the monster inside of the moon that is knocking the moon off its axis and on a collision course with Earth to distract us from life’s inexorable horrors.
That is the wonderful premise of Roland Emmerich’s 2022 mega-fiasco Moonfall. Moonfall has arguably the greatest premise of any film other than Cocaine Bear and amply delivers on its incredible capacity for camp pleasure, yet audiences cruelly turned their back on it all the same.
Instead of rewarding Emmerich for doing the Lord’s work and making a movie about the monster inside of the moon with record-setting box-office grosses and a shelf full of Academy Awards, Moonfall was a big old flop and did not win even a single Academy Award. Not even for Best Picture.
This is going to sound crazy, but there were actually some critics and audiences who thought that the idea of making a movie about astronauts who have to go to the moon to kill the monster inside of the moon was somehow “stupid” or “cheesy” or “an almost impossibly idiotic premise for a blockbuster science-fiction film.”
People thought that Moonfall’s premise sounded more like a 30 Rock joke satirizing the high-concept idiocy of blockbuster filmmaking in general and Emmerich’s oeuvre in particular than an actual plot for a movie people might actually want to pay money to see.
I am here to report that the movie where there’s a monster inside of the moon is very real and very spectacular. Moonfall is spectacularly silly more than anything, but that is enough for me, friend.
Arguably, the greatest movie ever made begins in 2011 with Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), Alan Marcus (Frank Fiola), and Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) palling around in outer space. They’re discussing the famously enigmatic lyrics to Toto’s “Africa” and break-dancing in zero gravity when they’re attacked by a mysterious space monster that looks and moves like an inky black version of Tremors’ Graboids.
Newbie Alan is killed in the attack. As always, the handsome straight white hero takes the blame and gets screwed.
NASA gingerly tosses Brian under the bus. The government and the public refuse to believe his account of the incident. He goes from space hero to space zero, from astronaut stud to widely mocked dud.
An anchor woman hilariously vomits up exposition, explaining stiffly, “Harper was once celebrated for the heroic landing of the Endeavor space shuttle in spite of a complete meltdown of all onboard electronics. Harper’s legal options have been exhausted, and it’s become clear that the accident was the result of human error. Today’s loss is the final blow in this very public fall from grace,” as Brian’s son Sonny (Azriel Dalman) looks on in sadness and disgust.
This shameless info dump tells us everything we need to know and more about how far our hero has fallen since we saw him gallivanting in outer space, but it also sets up the main action by establishing his bona fides for the big space mission that takes up much of the film’s one hundred and thirty-minute runtime.
The kicker of this wonderfully awkward sequence is that this is not the first time the hero’s son has watched this news report about his dad being a total failure. The masochistic moppet taped it so that he could watch it on repeat and be reminded over and over again how his dad screwed up.
Nobody likes an astronaut screw-up. His wife leaves him. His son is a juvenile delinquent and thrill seeker. He’s publicly disgraced. When he walks down the street, I wouldn’t be surprised if random strangers yell, “Hey, Space Loser! On your way to screw up more astro-missions? Don’t kill any more of your fellow astronauts today! Oh wait, I forgot. You can’t because you can’t go into space anymore, ya big space dummy!”
Incidentally, when I see Patrick Wilson starring in a movie like this, I assume that Chris Pratt said no. Ten people less popular than Chris Pratt also said no, so they reluctantly went with Wilson.
I like Wilson. He’s a good actor and extremely handsome, but I also assume that he’s nobody’s first choice for a lead role in a would-be tentpole like this.
The only person who still believes in the disgraced space stud is K.C. Houseman (John Bradley), a conspiracy theorist who believes that the moon is a hollow megastructure and that something has knocked its orbit dangerously off course. Bradley has big-time Josh Gad energy in the role, which makes sense considering that Gad was actually cast in the role but left.
Donald Trump has ruined conspiracy theories in movies because it’s hard to encounter even a lovable, heroic conspiracy theorist and not assume that he definitely would have been at the Capitol on January 6th.
K.C. also worships Elon Musk to the point that he asks himself, “What would Elon do?” before making important decisions. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has ruined Elon Musk. The Musk that K.C. idolizes is the personification of scientific ambition, not the right-wing troll who ruined Twitter, thinks the media is racist against white people, and defends Scott Adams’ segregationist beliefs.
Moonfall is a Roland Emmerich disaster movie, so it’s full of wonderfully unnecessary character touches, like having K.C. get fired from a job in fast food shortly before he is tapped to fly to outer space and save the world.
K.C. and his band of kooks are dismissed as nutty conspiracy theorists until the moon gets knocked off its orbit by some manner of space monster and begins to fall to Earth, causing a very Roland Emmerich-style CGI apocalypse.
It falls upon the heroic trio of Brian, Jocinda, and K.C. to fly to the moon, kill the monster inside it that’s causing all the problems, and then fly back to Earth once they’re done saving humanity.
That seems like an awful tall order, particularly considering that K.C. appears to have no relevant space experience whatsoever. The closest he’s come to training is regularly cold-calling NASA to tell them that the moon is a big mechanical doo-hickey and that there may be a monster inside of it.
My enjoyment of Moonfall was heightened by the thought of Neil Tyson DeGrasse watching it and having his brain explode, Scanners-style, from its flagrant disregard for realism. Moonfall doesn’t have plot holes so much that it is one big plot hole big enough to fit inside the moon.
A more cynical and less earnest filmmaker would include a smart-ass Bill Murray character to wink at the audience to acknowledge that the filmmakers realize just how ridiculous everything is.
Emmerich doesn’t do that. Though there are moments of humor throughout, he commits wholeheartedly to the surreal idiocy of the film’s premise with wonderfully misplaced conviction. The result is Emmerich’s most entertaining film since White House Down.
Moonfall lives up its premise involving astronauts going to the moon to kill the monster inside of the moon. That is not just high praise: that is the highest possible praise you can give any piece of entertainment, cinematic or otherwise.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
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