Imagine that one day everything is simply hunky dory, except for this one little bitty thing that is something of a concern. The human race has just discovered that the moon is not after all made of cheese, but made by aliens. All these millennia of human history; of looking at it, walking on it, exploring it, and now we discover the moon, its hollow, its hostile. Who would have guessed that? Its actually a giant lunar computer, space craft or something fabulously techy and really really impressive.
But it's got a virus, in the form of a swarming black snake of shards of silica or glass. Well, whatever it is, its mean, and its attacking space craft, and its making the moon shift out of its orbit so that its heading straight for the Earth. As you can imagine, this is causing some alarm, and a moderate to worrying level of peril. About two hours worth of it. What we need in such a time is a conspiracy theory nerd who basically understands what's going on. Because if you do understand what the hell is happening here, you really do have to be bat shit crazy.
Now, Roland Emmerich has a substantial movie record. And I do mean substantial, he has real form in the production of implausible, yet remarkably successful, disaster movies. Something he executes with great aplomb and generous amounts of CGI generated cliff hangers, on many occasions even literally hanging cliffs. Usually this also involves the destruction of iconic places and monuments, because what communicates a worldwide disaster better? I mean how many times has the New York skyline been flooded, frozen or shattered into tiny bits, the White House wiped off the face, or huge gaps opened up in the ground that swallowed the entire San Francisco integrated transport network? They are blockbusters that have generated cataclysmic amounts of money for all involved, and been popular. I watch em, several times.
Now, I don't mind a bit of implausibility, just so long as it romps along and doesn't take itself or the giant plot holes too seriously. Its a mindless bit of adventure, and who doesn't want a bit of that from time to time? To be rendered utterly mindless. But here Emmerich has excelled even his usually astutely placed low bar. If you want your credibility to be taxed, well here it is. Moonfall is not just hokkum, its preposterous high hokkum, ludicrously stupid, silly hokkum that anyone with one brain cell intact would shake their head wondering how on this imperilled Earth did this shit get made?
Awards all round to those actors involved for keeping a straight face and resisting the impulse to take the piss out of it. That was some effort I know, but I just wanted you to know I recognised it, valued it and saw it for what it was - truly heroic. May I suggest though, to surreptitiously omit this from your CV.
CARROT REVIEW - 2/8
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