Moonfall (2022)

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Roland Emmerich must be stopped. Since 1996’s Independence Day, the director has been obsessed with apocalyptic disaster movies like Godzilla, 10,000 BC, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 — each one exponentially dumber than the preceding. When I heard he was directing a movie about the moon falling to Earth, I though, ‘Well, of course he is.’ I knew to expect mass destruction and mayhem, big explosions, giant tidal waves, cheezy scene capper lines like, “God help us all,” and “I love you very much.” And it has all that. Yet it’s so much more awful than I ever could have predicted.

The moon isn’t the moon we all know and love in this movie. No, Emmerich has rewritten history and bent science to his will. The moon is now an alien-made vessel in disguise. And there’s an a big, swarmy enemy alien that attacks it, pushing it off it’s course. The world goes nuts as the moon comes crashing down to us, causing massive flooding, atmospheric oxygen leaks, and gravitational waves that make things float up into space. Fortunately, we have Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, and John Bradley (Game of Thrones) to launch themselves in a space shuttle, go inside the moon, sort things out with the aliens, and park the moon back in its regular parking spot.

If that sounds like a good movie to you, God bless you. You must be one of those people who love bad movies on purpose. And I get that. But for everyone else, approach Moonfall at your peril. With Charlie Plummer, Michael Peña, and the saddest, most pitifully gratuitous use of Donald Sutherland ever in a movie.