Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall Isn’t Nearly as Scary as Real Life

(Bloomberg) -- Two years into a pandemic in which the threat remains amorphous, invisible, and omnipresent, it came as something of a relief to watch a blockbuster whose menace is reassuringly tactile.

I'm referring, of course, to the moon. In director Roland Emmerich's newest disaster movie Moonfall, our celestial satellite is headed toward Earth.

Emmerich is no stranger to destruction. Some of his best efforts have employed aliens (the superb 1996 barnburner Independence Day), climate change (The Day After Tomorrow, in which it fell upon a salty Dennis Quaid to rescue a young Jake Gylenhall from … the cold). In 2012, it was the Earth itself.

In each of these movies, Emmerich was able to balance carnage with feel-good, human-size stories, to the extent that 2012's ending is “happy” because Amanda Peet has reconciled with her ne'er do well ex-husband (John Cusack). Never mind that 99.99% of the world's population was wiped out in a day.

It's a formula that works primarily because Emmerich's feats of annihilation are both monumental and distant—you might watch the Chrysler building fall, but you don't see anyone inside. He also has a knack for picking movie stars who are charismatic enough to serve as a welcome reprieve from his many CGI cataclysms.

In Moonfall, the emotional burden rests uneasily on the shoulders of former astronauts and colleagues Jocinda “Jo” Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson).

Written by Emmerich, Harald Kloser, and Spencer Cohen, the movie's requisite setup involves a freak accident during a space mission gone horribly wrong. A colleague dies, and Fowler is knocked unconscious. Harper is forced to bring a shuttle back to Earth, whereupon he insists the tragedy was no accident, a stance that ends his career. Fowler takes a more measured approach and rises through the ranks.

Ten years later, Harper is a washed-up has-been. He's divorced, which in Emmerich's world is a cardinal but reversible sin, estranged from his son Sonny (an indistinct Charlie Plummer), and professionally adrift, relegated to lecturing school groups on the solar system. (Sad!)

Fowler, in contrast, is now deputy director of NASA. Somewhere along the way she's had a child. She has also gotten divorced and now lives the life of a busy career woman, leaving child care in the hands of a live-in Chinese exchange student (an underused Kelly Yu).

It looks as if the two will never meet again, but then things start to go wrong—specifically, the moon begins to fall out of orbit.

Well before NASA notices though, a conspiracy theorist, K.C. Houseman (Game of Thrones' John Bradley), gets there first. Of course, no one believes him, which allows Emmerich to indulge in a variety of cliches, including Houseman being dragged from a building yelling “I'm not crazy.”

Soon enough though, governmental bodies learn the truth, and audiences are treated to a further checklist of tropes, including lines such as “the math checks out” and “I work for the American people, and you're keeping them in the dark.”

The film, which has a reported budget of about $150 million, takes multiple swings at relevancy, most notably in its fawning references to Tesla founder Elon Musk. There is a picture of his SpaceX project, the literal line “I love Elon,” and a nod to Tesla's Ludicrous Mode, which itself is a reference to the 1987 film Spaceballs.

In short order, Harper and Fowler are reunited in a last-ditch effort to save the Earth, with a plucky Houseman along for the ride. This should be where the movie gets good, but Emmerich, forsaking the formula that made his previous films a success, packs his three most compelling leads into a spacecraft and sends them into orbit, leaving us indifferent to the fate of the various spouses and progeny on terra firma. When Emmerich destroys downtown Aspen, Colo., I actually heard someone in the theater cheer.

Perhaps the absence of dramatic tension in Moonfall was inevitable. After all, we live in a time when a maskless theater audience, happily munching on popcorn and Sour Patch Kids, is enough to legitimately terrify a good chunk of the population. How can a mere moon compare to that?

Moonfall is in theaters starting on Feb. 4.