Some February flotsam washes up in theaters this weekend...
Moonfall--In the 1987 classic Moonstruck, sweet Uncle Raymond recalls being awakened, as a young man, by the light of a huge and brilliant Moon outside his window, summoned by the power of love. "I was almost scared," he says, "like it was going to crush the house."
This story is made literal in Moonfall, Roland Emmerich's extravagant new sci-fi disaster epic. But there's more dramatic weight in Uncle Raymond's little monologue than there is in all of Emmerich's picture.
The Moon comes loose from its orbit and starts spiraling toward Earth. A young amateur scientist (John Bradley), regarded as a fringe-y nutjob, knows why: It's not a natural satellite; it's an alien construct and is hollow, and NASA has known it all along and hushed it up. He's finally able to convince a wrongfully disgraced astronaut (Patrick Wilson) and a NASA honcho (Halle Berry) that he's on to something, and the three of them end up on a desperate shuttle mission to confront an alien nanotechnology cloud that looks like a giant space moray, and put the Moon back in its place, marking months and menstrual cycles.
This isn't the first time in pop culture that the Moon has been knocked out of orbit; back in the '70s the Brit TV show Space: 1999 sent the satellite careening away from the Earth, carrying its colonists across the galaxy like an interstellar Flying Dutchman. But preposterous as that show was, it seems like hard sci-fi compared to Moonfall. This U.S.-American co-production is really, really silly. It's silly even by Roland Emmerich standards, even though he keeps recycling ludicrous ideas from his earlier films, like 2012 and Independence Day. And it's queasy at times, too, as with a couple of ass-kissy references to Elon Musk.
That said, the movie doesn't skimp; said to be among the most expensive "independent" movies ever made, it seems to get most of that money onscreen in the form of elaborate special effects and other production values. And I can't say it's boring, either. There's plenty to be said against Emmerich, but letting things drag isn't among them, even though the characters, with the moon bearing down over their heads like a Goodyear blimp, still take the time to fret about their personal problems. Emmerich just makes them fret in motion.
There is one stock figure that Emmerich should maybe consider retiring: The crackpot who knows the truth. Bradley charmingly plays the obsessed moon-watcher here (he owns a cat named "Fuzz Aldrin"). But Emmerich, who made a film a few years ago about how the Earl of Oxford was the true author of Shakespeare's plays, has used variations on the role before, like Woody Harrelson's Art Bell-style radio ranter in 2012 and Randy Quaid's cropdusting UFO abductee in Independence Day, and they've also turned up in movies by other filmmakers, like Brian Tyree Henry's character in last year's Godzilla vs. Kong. It's an admittedly seductive stereotype, but perhaps this isn't the most auspicious moment to romanticize conspiracy theorists.
One of the orphaned cubs gets stranded in the forest on a private island in Canada, where he's adopted by a beautiful young musical prodigy who has inherited the gorgeous place from her late grandfather. His adopted brother is a wolf pup, likewise motherless. Their foster mom names the lion "Dreamer" and the wolf, appropriately enough, "Mozart," and they bond.
Eventually the pair are separated; Dreamer to a circus and Mozart to a research facility. But our heroine's efforts to reunite them are tireless. There's some peril that smaller kids might find upsetting, but nothing that rises to the level of those opening shots.
The movie has that polished but unshakably ersatz feel that so many Canadian productions do, and the dialogue sometimes sounds like the product of Google Translate. But hey, you get to see a baby lion and baby wolf tussle and romp and smooch. Maybe that's enough for you; for long stretches of this movie, it was enough for me.
