What did I want out of a movie where the Moon falls to the Earth?
More. So, so much more. But no. Liberals took that from us.
This movie should've been the ideal platform for director Roland Emmerich (Stonewall). This movie was the perfect opportunity for the ever-escalating disaster auteur to throw his head back and say "Fuck it, I'm going to throw the fucking MOON at Earth"
You can imagine it, can't you? The beauty of the moon falling to the earth on the big screen.
People running in the streets! Shooting each other! Rioting!
Fucked up gravity ripping hundreds into the air away from their loved ones! Enormous tidal waves crashing though the crowded streets of LA or NYC, demolishing building after building, crushing millions of people underneath the weight of the literal God Damn Moon!
But there was none of that.
This movie feels like it that truly failed to achieve the heights it was meant to achieve as a direct result of the pandemic.
It's a weirdly empty film. There's only a handful of actors and extras. We never see crowds of people because you couldn't film it at the time.
There are a couple scenes at NASA with maybe 15 people at once but they're all socially distanced. You never feel harried because there's so much dead space in every shot.
We all love INDEPENDENCE DAY. You're a filthy communist if you don't.
Despite having a better budget, special effects, and an even cooler idea than ID4, MOONFALL doesn't have some of the very important scenes that help us as the audience grapple with the stakes.
Before the aliens first attack, we meet a character who's excited they're here. She goes to a rooftop party to welcome them.
She's surrounded by hundreds of people all packed in and we see through her eyes as the ship opens up and then the horror as a laser shoots out and obliterates everyone there.
The destruction from the laser then cascades out to destroy all of LA.
That's good filmmaking. That's entertainment.
"The world will be destroyed" is such an abstract concept that it is impossible to understand. "The city will be destroyed" is also hard because a city has a million people in it. It's hard to grasp what a million people look like.
That's why in ID4, we start small with this one character who's nice and friendly surrounded by people who think like her. We watch her die then the city around her. That's effective. It immediately invests us emotionally in the stakes of the film.
Unfortunately for MOONFALL, Emmerich didn't have that luxury again.
He couldn't film on locations, because travel restrictions were in place. He couldn't stuff a scene of extras because they all had to be social distanced. He had to change a lot of the cast because actors kept getting stuck in lockdowns or testing positive for COVID.
And you feel it throughout the movie. The world the heroes are trying to save just feels empty. As the tides are crashing through the streets of LA, there's no one walking about getting swept away. Just vacant buildings and cars.
When the families of the heroes are trying to escape destruction, the vast majority just kind of do. No long-extended shots of gridlocked highways. No crowds of people getting out of their cars and running from the incoming water.
Later in the movie, New York gets destroyed by moon debris and messed up gravity. The top of the Empire State Building gets ripped up and flung all the way to the Rocky Mountains!
Was anyone in it? Was anyone hurt? Maybe, but we never see because the producers couldn't get enough actors on the screen to make the seen hold any . . . gravity (pun!).
The end result is a movie about the Moon falling to Earth that, somehow, feels so small. I mean, the fucking Moon is crashing into the goddamn Earth and its only affecting these 12 people.
Everyone else is fine, non-existent. or just failed to notice, presumably.
Somewhere in Roland Emmerich's dream was the greatest disaster epic ever put to film. A movie that would've remained in the pop-culture zeitgeist for generations!
Instead, Liberals and their adherence to "COVID theater" deprived us of an actual entertaining theater experience. Liberals hate sacrifice for art. They hate fun. And they hate you.
Cinematography: Effective and Competent. Nothing special.
Performances: Effective and Competent. Like all Emmerich movies.
Score: Pretty fine, but forgettable
Length: 2 brisk hours. Wonderful.
Final Score: 4/10. I hate liberals.
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