Moonfall (2022) It's very possible that this movie might serve as director Roland Emmerich's exact equivalent to director Irwin Allen's 1980 "When Time Ran Out"......
Let us now explain......
Allen, a tireless TV-Movie shlockmeister, kicked off the disaster movie genre with his all-star upside-down cruise ship circus "The Poseidon Adventure"......a massive hit was born.
Riding further into disaster glory, Allen reached his very...uh...heights with his even more all-star burning skyscraper spectacle "The Towering Inferno".....
But it was all downhill from there.....Allen's reputation as a disaster specialist took a drubbing with his ludicrous, unintentionally funny killer-bee fiasco "The Swarm".....and Allen himself hammered the final coffin nail into the genre he ruled over with "When Time Ran Out".....his all-star volcano-lava epic with a deeply embarrassed Paul Newman and William Holden.
Ah, but those were the days when Allen had to fashion his apocalypses with old-school special effects - miniatures, matte paintings, and practical on-set physical destruction surrounding the actors....
Then behold, came the dawn of CGI, fueled by endless small armies of digital animators who could conjure up any end-of-the-world imagery a director could imagine......and the actors spent their entire time dangling from wires in a warehouse surrounded by green screens......
Roland Emmerich emerged as the new Master Of Disaster with "Independence Day" , featuring vast alien ships zapping the White House and the Empire State Building into computerized oblivion....
And Emmerich never looked back, plunging into one brain-dead, GGI-fest after another....(the reviled "Godzilla", the dopey "Independence Day: Resurgence" , the climate-gone-awry "The Day After Tomorrow" and the laughable end-of-days "2012"..
But all of the many flaws that sort of charmed audiences in "Independence Day", became more pronounced, annoying and snicker-worthy as these films dragged on........the cornball characters, the shameless ploys for pathos, the senseless plotting and the ever idiotic science involved.
Which brings us back to our original premise........Just as the remaining wobbly wheels came off Irwin Allen's disaster train with "When Time Ran Out" , so too did "Moonfall" finally dismantle Roland Emmerich's CGI parade of imbecilic catastrophes.
"Moonfall" which unravels like a tiresome recitation of Emmerich's 'Greates Hits', came. went and disappeared from the pop culture radar in an instant.......even faster than a Steven Seagal, Nicholas Cage direct-to-DVD Wal-Mart bin special.
There was no reason for anyone to sit through it.......we'd seen it all before, knew all the expected plot cliches before they even happened and all of the yawn-provoking borrows from other sci-fi disaster movies ("Armageddon", "Contact" and all of Emmerich's previous films.....)_
A movie like this, which right away announces itself as heavily financed by Chinese producers, now seems redundant.......since the Chinese themselves are now perfectly capable of creating their very own idiotic disaster movies that more than equal, and even surpass Emmerich's stuff in sheer spectacular stupidity....
(For full proof, look no further than our 4/7/22 review of the entirely Chinese created "Skyfire".....set in a ....(we kid you not).....a luxurious resort parked against an active volcano....)
We see no reason to labor over explaining the plot of "Moonfall", other than it's about the moon, revealed as a constructed alien machine, now on a crash course for Earth........and no one can save us but Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, and some comic--relief British guy who looks like a dead ringer for writer-director Kevin Smith.
For those who still relish a booze-soaked, 'Mystery Science Theatre 3000' sitdown to mock a monumentally terrible movie, than here's one for your Saturday night pleasure. For everyone else, it's a Zero Star (0) avoid-at-all-costs experience....
And as for Roland Emmerich, just as it did for Irwin Allen back in '80, "Moonfall" is the moment.......
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