Moonfall reviewed by Mark Kermode

moonfall excellent which is the latest from roland emmerich the uh the the master of disaster i suppose having taken over the title from irwin allen you know owen allen who was the the guy he gave us in all those things like uh you know poseidon adventure and all that stuff disaster master the disaster master master of disaster so emeric is the you know he's an auteur he's worked with jason isaacs behind stargate independence day uh day after tomorrow 2012. um midway uh moon 44 where's the ancient age ago and and and now moon falls so the film had a budget of around 146 million so you know solid budget um apparently one of the most expensive independent films ever produced starts off as a rip-off of gravity and the martian with brian patrick wilson and joe halle berry in space doing some stuff listening to some vintage pop here's a clip what does it even mean to miss the rains down in africa the lyrics are i bless reigns down in africa what no they're not uh yes they are it makes even less sense well i should know because i karaoked it at my wedding ah well i must have missed that i was in the zone tearing it up on the dance floor you can't dance to save your life anyone ever tell you guys you bicker like a like an old married couple she's my work wife back to work rookie [Music] i would like to thank you for spending your honeymoon in space with us it was either space or italy [Music] italy doesn't beat this one if you'd like to choose toto for all requests friday you can call me later okay so they're in space and around listening to toto so it's gravity meets the martian suddenly gloopy gloopy globules of of black nodular space stuff big come rushing rushing past and cause massive gravity-style destruction you know thing all smashed up they lose a crew member they lose a crew member so then they have to find their way back to work and they get back to earth brian says we were in space big massive gloopy stuff knocked us out of the the thing and we lost a crew member and they go we're not buying this matey boy you're making all this stuff up and they say to joe that could have been a solar flare couldn't it and she says no and they'd go could it she would well all right maybe cut to 10 years later his life has fallen apart he's now drinking too much fixing up cars dodging his rent but he's called back into action when the moon starts to fall that's the money the moon starts to fall okay and how does he know the moon starts to fall because toto record because it's closer to the thing because a conspiracy theorist called uh called casey who is uh just gets you know who's played by john bradley casey houseman gets in touch and says okay the reason that the moon is falling out of the sky and you must do something about it is because the moon is a is a mega structure it's not a moon it's a mega structure and therefore it's and he's a mega structuralist he's a conspiracy theory he's a mega structure somebody who believes in mega structures and so mega structuralist to make a structure make a structurist anyway he gets in touch and says you've got to do some moonies for a little bit and then brian says no but no because you're a tin hat conspiracy theory but then nasa get in touch and go the moon has come out of its orbit and is falling let's call it a moonfall what are we going to do i know let's send people up into space to see whether they can stop the moon falling out of the sky we better get you and joe and probably get the guy who's the mad conspiracy theorist because he he thinks the moon is made of cheese or something and then you can go up there and do the stuff so because at first nobody believes him but then in about five seconds flat everybody believes him the next thing they're all headed back into space with the nut job conspiracy theorist who tells us for reasons best known only to him he has irritable bowel syndrome excellent excellent so meanwhile down on earth so up and up in the moon the irritable bowel syndrome you don't want ibs if you've got a space suit on exactly moon made of cheese or maybe a mega structure down on earth everybody responds to the imminent end of the earth by doing what they do in disaster movies i must reconcile all my family problems immediately i must reconcile with my my wife or my ex-wife or my previous wife or my parents or and i must also because roland emerick can't decide he doesn't one film isn't enough so whilst the moon made of cheese or space cheese with full of the black globular stuff with the guy with irritable bowel syndrome is happening down on earth there's a car chase with snow and a shootout like grand theft auto because there's not enough happening up in space and entire cities and stuff is getting smashed down and destroyed by the fact that grab because the moon is now close enough to the earth that gravity has gone backwards so the sea becomes the sky and then a helicopter is flying underwater in the sky and all this stuff is happening but they have to turn the electricity off because somehow the moon is responding to and i'm saying that i am i'm i'm in this cinema in southampton there are four people in the cinema and i think i'm having more fun than anyone else in the cinema because this has got it's like it's it's like roland emrick was thinking uh what am i going to do am i going to am i going to rip off you know gravity am i going to rip off uh you know that that film the martian with the thing or or maybe i don't know maybe i like las vegas melancholia or or maybe maybe event horizon yeah there's a bit of event horizon in there and maybe i'll do a bit of stanley kubrick's 2001 and then sharknado i'll do sharp nato and it's the the level of stupid is so brilliant that it's almost magnificent i mean it's terrible it's the stupidest film i have ever seen in my whole life and i'm grinning from ear to ear there's a moment in it in which there's two characters there's a car chase and they're shooting at each other and they go bang bang bang bang bang bang and then michael penny puts his hand in the car and goes they're shooting at us and you go i know we just we literally saw there was that was what the bullets coming through the thing was that they're shooting at you this is what happened down the ground and then you cut back up into space made of cheese and the globular stuff happening and like things happen in about two seconds so there's a spaceship and it can't take off because one of the one of one of the engines isn't working but that's all right because gravity's upside down and the sea is in the sky and then the moon's gonna gonna rise and the oceans are gonna fall and i start you i mean you're going wow i mean really wow at some point somebody must have had a script meeting and gone uh roland i'm not entirely sure about all of this working i think you've got five different movies going on and he's going i don't care we get to destroy this city we get to destroy that city we got to blow up that blow up that planet we get to do this thing and then there's the thing in space and then and if you had dreamed this movie up after eating way too much cheese and then gone to sleep having had several sniffers of japanese whiskey you would have been hard pushed i mean the script is like it's been written by an alexa it does have the line you're telling me that the moon is the biggest cover-up in human history i mean it's like somebody went alexa write me a really really bad science fiction script it can say anything at all but it's called moonfall it's just it's called moonfall i don't care what you do it's called moonfall just do that and everyone in the film is like okay let's just yeah okay we've we've the the laws of gravity have gone out of the window the laws of drama have gone out of the window the laws of common sense have packed up their belongings and are fleeing for the hills which even now are being destroyed by an outtake from a lars von trier art movie i mean there's a one point this is one point during this chase sequence in which it genuinely looks like a computer game it genuinely like cars jumping over like this things fall down and they jump from mountain to mountain and thing and and then and then and then in remember do you remember how independence day ended with randy quaid doing that speech well it's randy's quite flying into the oh yeah yeah yeah about how the whole world will have its independence day no that's not randy quade that's the president i i was thinking randy quade was the president no randy quade is the guy who's in the is in the jet that flies it is randy quade isn't it i think it's randy quade now you're making me die anyway the pilot who flies who flies into the into the into the into the aliens donuts yeah anyway so it's he puts the wind up there he pumps the wind into the aliens donut yes and we're all free again well is that what you're saying yeah so there is i mean honestly watching this it makes geostorm look like a low-key but hard-hitting documentary about climate change but you can see it again wouldn't you i don't know if the second time around it could ever possibly live up to the the i mean it was i could it was like my brain turned to like sewage and was trickling out of my ear as a thought it was it was you're kind of in the presence of this thing is so radioactively dumb that you know you know that thing in altered states when he gets into the the sensory deprivation chamber and he reverts to an earlier form of mankind that's what i felt like i felt like i'd actually gone back three species generations i was walking on all fours and picking you know fleas off my i mean oh it's i guess i don't want to see it now yeah yeah and i kind of don't want to discourage you okay it's so bad do you think that they would have had a production meeting not no comma no answer no they had a production meeting where somebody said you know that adele song do you think we can oh hello can we just get to sing the word moon and then we'll just edit that over into the the other thing it does as well is it's one of those films that believes that cons you know tin hat conspiracy theorists are right and may i just say for the record they're not they're not

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Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022