Just before Christmas, Adam McKay released his all-star apocalypse satire Don’t Look Up, in which the political and media classes’ refusal to understand the danger of an approaching mega-comet was symbolic of climate-crisis denial. Sadly, that impeccably intentioned film turned out to be the celeb-comedy equivalent of Gal Gadot’s Imagine video. But its admirers said those critics disliking it were, as journalists, naturally complicit in the problem, and that they didn’t care about the environment. This liberal-arts version of Trumpian journalist-hate was all the odder as most of those expressing it were themselves journalists.
None of these issues apply to Moonfall, a film that is part of the well-established but humbler “disaster” genre, which paradoxically signals its lack of real concern in its deadly serious manner combined with a tacitly agreed happy ending, as opposed to satire concluding in tragedy. This bizarrely leaden new example of the action spectacular is from Roland Emmerich, a longtime master of these end-of-the-world-but-not-really films. But here the formulaic silliness, sometimes part of the enjoyment, is just tiring.
