Emmerich's latest disaster-fest takes his usual tropes and tries to mash them up with a very silly hard-sci-fi concept with very mixed results. Opening in 2011, when a Space Shuttle satellite repair mission is nearly destroyed by a strange cosmic entity heading for the Moon, the film then jumps forward a decade which sees the Moon mysteriously changing orbit and wreaking havoc on our planet. With perfunctory set-up of our three main mis-matched protagonists - Halle Berry going from Shuttle pilot to Head of NASA, Patrick Wilson the disgraced and broken former astronaut, and John Bradley the comedy-relief everyman genius conspiracy theorist - the first half-hour is so simplistic that it feels as if Emmerich cannot wait to unleash the mayhem as the film posits the notion that the Moon is a hollow alien construct and the first effects of its errant orbit start to manifest themselves in the usual huge-scale destruction. Moonfall is in many respects very much a formula Emmerich film that feels tiredly familiar. Here, however, the focus is more on the preposterous narrative premise than global destruction, making human life seem carelessly inconsequential as the film shifts to the sub-2001 exploits of our plucky space heroes as they embark on a mission to 'fix' the Moon and thus save Earth. This film is a classic demonstration of huge-scale shiny special effects unable to save a silly story.
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