Moon­fall

The more you think about it, the stranger it seems that we have no tech­ni­cal term for the moon. There’s plen­ty of incom­pre­hen­si­ble jar­gon-speak in Roland Emmerich’s new oblit­er­atathon, Moon­fall (not to men­tion a heap­ing help­ing of mum­bo-jum­bo wait­ing in the third act), but when the best-in-their field tech­ni­cal experts talk about the big rock in the sky try­ing to mur­der Earth, they use the same words we would.

After the first dozen utter­ances, the phrase ​“the moon” reach­es the point of seman­tic sati­a­tion and sounds like non­sense nois­es, no dif­fer­ent than if we renamed it ​“Zarble‑7.” Yet soon after that, down-on-their-luck astro­nauts Bri­an Harp­er (Patrick Wil­son) and Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) refer to the moon with the famil­iar­i­ty one might extend to an old friend. That pesky moon! What’s it up to now?

The short answer is that its cir­cu­lar revolv­ing path has tight­ened into a spi­ral that ends with plan­e­tary anni­hi­la­tion, a grave­ly seri­ous predica­ment at odds with the over­all atmos­phere of dumb­bell delir­i­um. That junc­ture where the sil­ly meets the sub­lime also hap­pens to be Emmerich’s sweet spot, his mass-destruc­tion max­i­mal­ism held togeth­er by the often-tedious tracts of hare-brained con­vo­lu­tion that con­sti­tute the story.

He’s among the best at what he does, more adept with macro-scaled CGI than the scads of indie-cir­cuit alum­ni stuck into the fran­chise meat­grinder by exec­u­tives at Mar­vel-Dis­ney-Corp. Virtues we took for grant­ed as recent­ly as 10 years ago – spa­tial coheren­cy, clar­i­ty and con­sis­ten­cy of colour – are now ele­vat­ed by the low­ered bar to a place of con­scious appreciation.

We kill time between the cat­a­clysmic set pieces with an ensem­ble of bores meant to offer a mul­ti­tude of per­spec­tives on the anti-grav­i­ty gey­sers of upward water and the lethal mete­or show­ers. Bri­an and Jo must bring along the dwee­by con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist K.C. (John Bradley) for his exper­tise in ​“megas­truc­tures” and, pre­sum­ably, to deliv­er fee­ble one-liners.

On the ground, Bri­an and Jo’s respec­tive ex-spous­es Bren­da (Car­oli­na Bartczak) and Doug (Eme Ikwuakor) scram­ble on sep­a­rate fronts to fore­stall the apoc­a­lypse, with a telling con­tempt from the screen­writ­ers reserved for Brenda’s new hus­band Tom (Michael Peña, reduced here to shilling for Lexus). Else­where, Brian’s né’er-do-well son (Char­lie Plum­mer) and a ran­dom Chi­nese woman (Kel­ly Yu, the pur­pose of her pres­ence in the film unclear besides sweet­en­ing the deal for financiers at Huayi Broth­ers) must stave off the rov­ing gangs of maraud­ers that rule the shat­tered world.

It’s all very stu­pid, if only some­times in an amus­ing way. The drag­gy lead­up to the cli­mac­tic res­cue mis­sion in low orbit often gets tan­gled in a seem­ing unaware­ness of how any­thing works; not NASA, which appears to be a shoe­string oper­a­tion made up of a few peo­ple; not Amer­i­can geog­ra­phy, warped to allow instan­ta­neous cross-coun­try pas­sage between cuts; and not Don­ald Suther­land, lit­er­al­ly wheeled out for one scene that feels air­dropped in from anoth­er universe’s cut of this film.

Sutherland’s wild-eyed expo­si­tion-dis­penser is of a piece with the tran­scen­dent­ly absurd info-dumps that explain what’s afoot with this whole moon sit­u­a­tion dur­ing the final half-hour. They’re the best kind of idi­ot­ic, the sort that can use the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull of the beau­ti­ful, ter­ri­ble moon to sling­shot itself back to inspiration.

If only Emmerich could har­ness the inher­ent humour of the po-faced earnest­ness with which he regards the end of the world, his life’s great muse. In spo­radic dribs and drabs, it’s not quite enough to sus­tain the film’s two lugubri­ous hours. Anoth­er thought occurs to the crit­ic: the knee-jerk laugh­ter every time some­one says ​“the moon” could’ve just been a defence mech­a­nism against boredom.