Moonfall (2022)

Who does world-ending, apocalyptic, mega-budget catastrophes better than Roland Emmerich? Okay, so they're not based in any kind of actual reality and often farcical in the extreme, but we cannot deny that as far as behemoth scale and open-mouthed wonder are concerned, you really don't need or want anyone else in charge.

Whenever I watch an Emmerich film, I am lovingly reminded of Doug McClure, a real hero of my youth. He took me on flights of fancy as glamourous and impossible as this. These would look timid and dated with modern eyes, but the feeling of runaway adventure, devoid of actual reason, to dally with brief moments, lacking common-sense, is still the same.

Often it is he who is able to pull it off that is the difference between success and failure, so a lead must be that. Patrick Wilson does the job admirably here, the once hero type astronaut, sacked by NASA years before is now asked to jump back into the fray as the Moon, for some as yet unknown reason, has broken away from its orbit and is now plummeting towards earth. Cue tectonic chaos, tidal chaos, global humanity chaos.

Well, you get the picture. There is some chaos.

All of this end-of-the-worlding is deliciously envisioned by Emmerich as usual and the visuals are just state of the art as we currently perceive it. You cannot argue the grandiose nihilism of his approach. We focus on the handful of people directly (and only a couple indirectly) involved in the world-saving plan and not the millions of people that have suffered to make them look good doing it.

This has more bells and whistles than your local percussion factory and boy does it like showing you as much. The gleeful kid in me was gobsmacked by what was shown, immersed just enough to ignore the hammy acting and cheesy dialogue, which is another staple of Emmerich projects. This is immense fun all the way through and not the least bit realistic. Science be damned, this is popcorn entertainment at its most ludicrously slutty.