Let’s be real: The ‘10s were not a particularly good decade for Roland Emmerich career-wise. Only one of his releases – 2013’s White House Down – could be called a true Saturday afternoon TNT classic, which was the mode he operated best in, and his attempts to pivot away from big-budget spectacle and move towards a more “personal” cinema went down in flames (anybody remember Stonewall?). His attempts to tap into that old creative vein failed, even if something like Midway was more fun than it initially seemed to be, but it felt like the spark was gone. Emmerich specializes in bringing a certain kind of lunacy to the screen: a bonanza of human misery, ecological collapse, and civilization-wide devastation that’s as hideously thrilling as it is compelling, incorporating decades worth of disaster-movie cliché into the melodrama and plotting in order to create what I believe Plato called “the ideal form of shit getting FUBAR.” They’re immensely entertaining works of populist art, structured around a moral framework in which the Just get what they deserve and the Unjust likewise receive their just desserts, and as in horror, it’s an incredibly fun experience to sit in the position of the judge, to rain down havoc upon the world and be thrilled by it in the process. So it brings me a great amount of joy to tell you that his most recent release, Moonfall, is braindead, thunderously goofy, impossibly well-crafted and a genuinely delightful time at the movies. Welcome back, buddy.
It should come as no surprise that Moonfall is about, well, the moon falling. Specifically, something has moved the celestial object out of its proper orbit, and it’s heading right on a collision course with Earth itself. That something — a conspicuous grouping of grey-goo like something, arranging itself as if it had seen the worms from Dune and said “Hey, you know, this could really use some more geometric clusterfuckery” and proceeded to auto-generate kaleidoscopic imagery – just so happens to be what former astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) saw a decade ago when, while on mission repairing a satellite with his navigator, Jo (Halle Berry), and an additional colleague who wasn’t quite so lucky, it proceeded to attack the space shuttle he was commanding. He tried to tell the truth about what happened and was tarred and feathered (metaphorically) by the powers that be, which tore his family apart in the process. He’s been thoroughly disgraced, ducking his landlord’s eviction notices and downing his sorrows in cheap beer, when he meets an unlikely source for his redemption: Dr. K.C. Houseman (John Bradley), a conspiracy theorist who has been shouting from the heavens to whoever will listen (all supported by data he obtained by posing as a janitor and breaking into offices at UC Irvine). He believes the moon is some kind of superstructure – a Dyson sphere, if you will – and that whatever is causing it to move is doing so intentionally. So, Wilson, Berry, and Bradley embark on a mission to save Earth from the moon, and also to save the moon from the military, who want to nuke the shit out of it before it hits Earth.
You can probably figure out the rest, as a lot of Moonfall is cobbled together from spare parts of Emmerich’s oeuvre – LA gets flooded, once again; characters spend the last half hour with a ticking time clock as a natural force threatens their ability to breathe (in 2012, it was drowning, now it’s… suffocation?); a daring raid occurs inside of an alien structure, and apparently enough time has passed since 9/11 that he feels comfortable showing a shot of Manhattan being destroyed by a crazy gravity wave/tsunami – but what’s new here is impressive in its own right. There is no other director working in (or adjacent to) the studio system who can provide the kind of large and exaggerated hellishness that he can, and while he might not be a great fit for, say, World War II films, Emmerich can string together sequences with awe-inspiring detail that feels ripped out of the imagination of a seven-year-old reading the synopsis for a Sci-Fi Channel B-movie. And the difference is that, in comparison to his imitators, he can normally add at least one or two things you have never seen in a film before, and you’ll occasionally be thrown off-guard by a weirdly beautiful image – a family, making their way through the snow, sky ablaze with crashing meteors – that makes the mixture even more intoxicating and strange. But, seriously: Ever want to watch a rocket try to escape a tsunami – one so crazy powerful that it’s being affected by gravitational waves and literally causing those on the ground to bounce like they’re on the surface of the moon? Well, here’s your fucking chance.
While Independence Day: Resurgence saw Emmerich’s genuine return to disaster playbook with an interesting idea (it is low-key cool that he decided to make a legacyquel that, as the best do, acknowledges the passage of time and its effect on a fictional world), his storytelling wasn’t quite up-to-snuff. There were few scenes of catastrophe – none with any of the weight that accompanies, say, seeing the White House get blown up by an alien vessel in the middle of the god damn Super Bowl — in between moments spent with charisma-free characters and older actors who genuinely could not be bothered to care about what was going on, and it’s wonderful to say that he’s reverted to the kind of disaster film that made him a blockbuster icon, with his catalog of Boschian disaster imagery supported by occasionally sweet melodrama. Wilson is an actor ideally suited to a role like this: a combo of spacefaring machismo and soft-hearted dad vibes, he feels like an off-brand attempt at recapturing the McConaughy magic of Interstellar, and though that’s typically meant as an insult, oftentimes (at least when it comes to soda and beer) it works just as well. Berry’s still adrift in the genre world as she has been for the last decade, but she’s decently emotive and earnest, which pairs well with the material in tone. Bradley, oddly enough, is compelling as the film’s emotional core, taking the “no one believed me until it was too late!” scientist archetype and adding some decent pathos to it, only occasionally making circlejerky Elon Musk gags, which is a swell improvement to how a lot of these types of characters operate (he’s got a cat named Fuzz Aldrin, however, who is central to saving the universe). So, we’ve got fun theatrics and imagery, and, importantly – perhaps the most important component when it comes to making an Emmerich stew — the best kind of (relatively benign) goofball conspiracy nonsense.
One can pretty easily make a case for Emmerich being underrated as a filmmaker, but also he’s also underappreciated as a conspiracy theorist, and he is the world’s greatest “Huh Makes You Think” huckster in modern blockbuster memory. He’s tackled, in order: ancient aliens (Stargate, 10,000 BC, this), Roswell/Area 51 (Independence Day), global warming (The Day After Tomorrow), the Mayan calendar (2012), atomic testing fallout (Godzilla), non-global warming-related weather manipulation (The Noah’s Ark Principle), Vietnam-era government testing on soldiers (Universal Soldier), seditious elements within the U.S. government collaborating with our enemies, foreign and domestic (White House Down), and even the fucking authorship question (Anonymous), which he somehow convinced studios to pay for. With the possible exception of Oliver Stone, there is no other director better at bringing the fringe into the mainstream cinema, and unlike Stone, Emmerich realizes this is mostly fiction and, thanks to those genre/spectacle trappings, he’s escaped a certain amount of scapegoating. Thing is, fringe woo-woo thought is a ton of fun and great fodder for fiction, hence the popularity of The X-Files and all sorts of conspiracy fiction, and he’s able to maintain a certain puckish quality to his usage of it. Moonfall is the most absurd yet, being by far the goofiest large-scale film he’s made since 2012, and if those words sound like fun to you, well, you should go ahead and get your IMAX tickets now. The moon only falls every so often.