How much unbelievability fits into a serious sci-fi movie? Moonfall is the ultimate no-brainer.
Maybe the moon really is just a balloon, as the actor David Niven called his autobiography. What he meant by that: Hollywood can make us believe anything. Maybe the moon is made of cheddar cheese, like in a Wallace and Gromit cartoon. Or a construct from extraterrestrials and hollow from the inside, as speculated quite early on in Roland Emmerich’s film “Moonfall”. After all, everything is possible in the cinema. If you make it possible. This is exactly the problem of this science fiction film, which, like the celestial body at its center, goes astray right from the start.
This track is nonetheless laid out according to tried-and-tested models. Emmerich, who shot his best film, “Das Arche-Noah-Principle”, as a student, still likes to tinker with something, just so that it breaks in the end. He illustrates the childlike amazement with heroes who are big children. Here it is Patrick Wilson as the astronaut ace who unfortunately fell out of favor with Nasa in the film’s prequel in 2011. It must have been an unfounded lawsuit in the early days of MeToo, something like that can happen.
But what gives the whole thing a somewhat unpleasant aftertaste: The woman whose statement brought him down at the time has meanwhile risen to the top ranks of the space agency. This is how chauvinistic boys explain female careers in male domains. After all, Halle Berry gives this character an impressive straightforwardness that seems to literally slip away from flat clichés. Of course, both will find themselves in a space shuttle in the final act for the literal ascension commando.
The secret main character is the third in the league, a plump supernerd played by John Bradley. It is thanks to his calculations that a moon was falling from the sky. And since the earth can’t jump sideways, you have to do something with the moon. That, in turn, sounds anything but impossible once you have gotten used to the young man’s daring theory: should the place of longing of entire legions of artists really be a hollow body controlled by extraterrestrials? Inhabited by artificial intelligences?
Now there is artificial intelligence, but there is also real stupidity. Much of the dialogue in this film is of a quality that even Hollywood’s poorest B-movie studios of the 1930s would have turned the writers out for (“Are you telling me the moon is the greatest deception in human history?”) . Of course, before they are uncovered, plenty of earthly problems have to be solved. After all, as is usually the case with Emmerich, it is a disaster film, a genre that goes back to novels like “The Last Days of Pompeii”. In this case, that’s two divorces and the astronaut’s misguided teenage son, who landed himself behind bars for a car theft days before launch.
Even before the film takes off, it collects a lot of literary space junk on its side scenes. All those things in life that you forget so easily when the tides go crazy because of the moon. And which will definitely come back to you when the basement is dry again.
As David Niven suggested, Hollywood can make the most unbelievable things seem plausible to us. Here it’s the other way around: you have to see this film to believe it. And that really is a pleasure. Fans affectionately speak of “no-brainers” when it comes to Emmerich’s blockbusters. Here he has surpassed himself, there has never been less brains. But the naivety of the whole thing has an intoxicating effect, especially when it comes to the finale inside the moon. One does not have to speak of the “sublimeness of the ridiculous” like the film critic of the “New Yorker” in an effort to counter the flood of slating. But it would also be unfair to shoot the director straight to the moon for this.
Moonfall. Regie: Roland Emmerich. 130 Min.
