Moonfall review – how can galactic catastrophe be this boring?

There are certain things you expect in a Roland Emmerich disaster movie called Moonfall. It’s the kind of film you go in to looking purely for dumb fun, the stupider and more bombastic the better, trading depth and characters for silly thrills with not much concern for good writing. What surprises about Moonfall, then, is that it is extremely boring, the worst example yet of the diminishing returns that Emmerich has been getting from his end-of-the-world premises ever since the high of Independence Day all the way back in 1996.

As the title suggests, Moonfall is about the moon essentially being possessed by malevolent nanotechnology and falling out of its conventional orbit and plummeting towards the earth, putting all life on the planet in danger. It’s a wilfully dumb and amusingly conspiracy-baiting premise (hollow moons and ancient alien civilisations are talked about a lot), one that could be a lot of fun if Emmerich ever really allowed it to build the momentum it needs.

At any point where the moon vs earth story starts to get interesting, he cuts away to one of the many deathly-dull sideplots. Our heroes are disgraced astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and head of NASA Jo Fowler (Halle Berry), but Emmerich insists on constantly interrupting their mission to fix the moon with updates on how their annoying and hideously-acted families are doing back on earth. It’s pretty much impossible to care, so these interludes slow the pace to a crawl (Moonfall runs at over two hours and wastes a vast amount of that time), robbing what should be a thrillingly high-stakes plot of any real urgency.

People just sort of bumble from scene to scene, and you never get the sense of much danger, even as tidal waves rise and chunks of moon rain down like meteors. It doesn’t help that most of the earthbound destruction scenes are an indistinguishable mess of CGI sludge and strangely depopulated areas – even as the sky burns and oceans start drifting into space, you only get the sense that a dozen or so lives are actually in danger.

Most of the cast are putting in either awful or just forgettable work, unable to chew through the abysmal dialogue, though it is impressive how Wilson manages to come out pretty unscathed. It’s a great testament to his general leading-man charms that you don’t feel second hand embarrassment for him like you do for Berry or Game of Thrones’s John Bradley, playing genius conspiracy nut KC Houseman.

There is one sequence towards the finale of Moonfall that is so entertainingly mental that it almost lifts the entire film up to a second star out of five, but that too is undercut by the following failed attempts at genuine emotion and a deeply unsatisfying ending. Emmerich seems most interested in the deep-space mythmaking that Moonfall’s nonsensical lore allows him to dabble in, which makes it just doubly baffling that he spends such torturously long stretches of the film in badly lit office-building interiors on earth. The human drama is never the primary draw in films like this, but in Moonfall it proves an active repellent, so completely shoddy and frustrating that sticking around all the way until the credits roll becomes a chore very, very quickly.

Moonfall is now showing in UK cinemas.