I watched Moonfall because my wife had rented it.
It had some good moments.
But. It missed the mark because it couldn’t decide what tone it was setting. It seemed targeted to be a tongue in cheek take up on disaster movies.
Right away, as a writer, there’s a big hurdle to clear: how do you show cities being wiped out and millions killed with a humorous angle? Maybe you don’t show it? But the writer, producer, and director, Roland Emmerich, also did Independence Day and is known for destroying things. So we got to see that, over and over, in a very inconsistent way. There was “gravity waves” that did strange things, although always what the families of the heroes needed in order to escape. Certain places were wiped out. Others weren’t. It was a hodgepodge of special effects.
The premise, that the moon itself is an alien artifact, was a stretch. But okay. I’ve got planet sized spaceships in my Area 51 series. Not only are Swarm Battle Cores, planet-sized, they are mostly alive. But they aren’t the moon which has been around for more than a few years and we’ve actually been to.
Apparently when Neal Armstrong stepped on the moon they found this out. What’s inconsistent though is that no one really thought this was an important enough thing to study further. Rather they deep-sixed the info. Okey-dokey. And we sent more missions there?
The twist of an AI battling whatever built the moonship is interesting, but seemed to just be a plot device.
Actually, this was a movie where logic can be tossed away. So, they should have gone with that. But, too often, it veered into a very serious mode. It was as if Emmerich couldn’t quite decide on the tone of the movie.
This is something writers understand. Tone is the over-riding emotion for a story. We were supposed to care about the characters and the fate of the world, or find humor in this as a farce? I don’t know and I don’t think he did either. I believe it was pitched as a farce. But they couldn’t pull it off.
Recommendation: Watch it if your spouse rents it.
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