Moonfall (2022)

There's no doubting that Roland Emmerich is the disaster man; whether that's a compliment or an insult is up to the individual. Proof of him being the daddy of the disaster lies in his ability to produce genuinely spectacular cinema (Independence Day [1996], The Day After Tomorrow [2004]) as well as absolute tripe (Independence Day: Resurgence [2016], Godzilla [1998]).

Here, he goes back to space with Moonfall, opening with a sequence that openly invites unfavorable comparisons with Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity (2013). Admittedly Emmerich doesn't attempt something quite as stunning as Cuarón's seventeen-minute opening take; he's aware of his own limitations in this sense.

So, a mysterious force has thrown the moon out of orbit and, surprise surprise, it's headed straight for Earth. It's up to Patrick Wilson, Game of Thrones' John Bradley and Halle Berry (amongst others) to save us all from Armageddon.

Moonfall follows the exact Emmerich disaster formula almost to a T, and the opening forty minutes or so are pretty entertaining as we're drawn into the familiar tropes of a nobody figuring out the (ludicrous) dreadful news, and only one person reluctantly believing him. All that's left, you would think, is for the second half of the film to play out as expected.

The problem is that instead of an expected remaining forty-five minutes from here, there's still an hour and a half left, which is far too much time to tempt Emmerich into Michael Bay-esque overkill, which he duly disappoints in producing.

Certainly Moonfall has its guilty pleasures, but in the end it's a combination of Sphere (1998), Deep Impact (1998) and Mission To Mars (2000) (or Armageddon [1998] if you're feeling particularly harsh) without managing to solely take the best parts from those films. It's far from Emmerich's best, but certainly not his worst. 5.9/10