Although it's arriving in theaters a few days late for Lunar New Year, "Moonfall," Roland Emmerich's latest tee-hee disaster flick, feels curiously well timed. Over the past few decades this director's love for apocalyptic bombast ("Independence Day," "The Day After Tomorrow," "2012") has been a reliable source of headaches, exasperation and, yes, a little dubious entertainment value. None of that has changed, but the times certainly have, and in an era of global pestilence and heightened geopolitical turmoil, Emmerich's doomsday visions offer a strange and generally welcome comfort. Walls of water toppling cities? Hellfire raining down from the heavens? A few families sadistically ripped apart while millions of others die horrible off-screen deaths? It's all so quaint, so reassuring, so 2019.
If the cataclysms look familiar, this time they have nothing to do with climate change, alien invaders or the Mayan calendar. No, it's the moon, the blasted moon, which, having quietly circled the Earth for almost 5 billion years, has decided to undergo a fateful orbital shift. Now she's breaking apart, raining large chunks of space debris on Earth and wreaking gravitational havoc. Mile-high tsunamis ensue, and before long the moon will pull our poor defenseless planet into a fiery embrace. I suspect that the science behind some of these developments is less than 100% sound, though Emmerich and his co-writers have cooked up some reasonably convincing explanations: "The hole is in the Mare Crisium!" "Everything we thought we knew about the nature of the universe has just gone out the window!" My favorite: "The sands in the hourglass are dropping quickly!"
These and other lines are bandied about, with admirably straight faces, by a pair of NASA astronauts named Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry). We first meet them on a routine space mission in 2011, when their shuttle is attacked by what looks like a massive killer-bee swarm originating from beneath the moon's surface. A third astronaut dies in the onslaught and Harper is blamed and drummed out of NASA in disgrace, no one having apparently believed his story or heeded his warning. Ten years later, as water levels rise and moon chunks fall, Fowler and the now-vindicated Harper must rejoin forces and save the world from imminent, terrifying and highly photogenic destruction.
