Moonfall

 If the Moon is really what you think it is, suit up!

Is Moonfall a good movie? Absolutely not. Yet it's so preposterous and silly that it was so much fun to watch in a cinema. 

You only really need to read the title to understand the premise. Yes, the Moon is falling to Earth and this is very bad. The reason for this involves a swarm-y entity which turns out to be some sort of artificial intelligence. Disgraced astronaut Brian (Patrick Wilson), his former partner and now acting head of NASA Jo (Halle Berry) and conspiracy theorist K.C. (John Bradley) work together in an attempt to sort things out whilst their families struggle to survive. 

There are moments when this film isn't that bad. Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry give decent performances given the material they are given (John Bradley less so) and most of the scenes of the families trying to survive the carnage brought by the Moon are actually quite decent, other than the most ridiculous car chase I've ever seen. 

My God this is stupid. The concept is so utterly ridiculous from the off and it just continues to get even more absurd. The climax reveals more details about the entity we've seen glimpses of and it's indescribably dumb. By comparison the whole defeating aliens with a computer virus thing in Independence Day is perfectly plausible. Don't get me wrong, stupid is fine but it doesn't really work here because it's played deadly seriously. K.C. is the comic relief but this film isn't a comedy and it really feels like it ought to be. 

The dialogue here is just astonishingly bad. The 'jokes' are very first base and obvious and virtually every line is cliched and uninspiring. It often felt to me like an artificial intelligence had been fed a load of sci-fi films and had spewed them into dialogue. 

Roland Emmerich is renowned for his impressive shots of cities being destroyed and even that is somewhat lacking here. There's a scene where LA is flooded by a huge tide which is rendered pretty poorly and one scene where we see Manhattan skyscrapers being pulled apart by the Moon's gravity and that's about it. What's especially weird is that no-one is shown dying in any of these events. Only a handful of people are actually shown to die in the film which seems to be remarkably lucky for the human species during this apocalyptic event. 

I'm not sure I've ever seen a film where the script is bad in so many ways. The dialogue is terrible, the concept is absurd, the plot is even more absurd and it all comes together into an utterly terrible film. It is at least saved by Wilson and Berry who make it considerably more watchable than it would otherwise be. I did enjoy watching it though because I laughed more times than virtually any comedy, though not at things that were meant to be funny. 

For me it falls firmly into 'so bad, it's good' territory.