n Paragraphs: Moonfall

2022, Roland Emmerich (Stargate) -- Amazon

I was bemoaning my personal state of things the other day, as I am wont to do, thinking that I don't really have anything in my life that excites me anymore. I have things I mildly enjoy, and most other things just distract me or are barely tolerated. The rest I complain about constantly, ad nauseum. I look at Kent and all the stuff he references occasionally in this movie/TV blog, things that capture his attention constantly, keep him enthusiastic about them for YEARS. And what, on that rare occasion it happens, do I get excited about? This stupid movie about THE... MOON... FALLING... DOWN. So much so that here I am writing a pre-amble for it, before even seeing it. So much so that I downloaded it last night, when it is available for free on Amazon. But I didn't watch it because Marmy was going to roll her eyes so badly, she would hurt herself. So, it will be my Saturday morning watching!

Some 24 hours later...

So, yeah, that was spectacular, a spectacularly stupid, wonderful, silly, bombastic experience!

Preamble, 2011. Astronauts Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson, Watchmen), Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry, Cat Woman) and Marcus (Frank Fiola, La Maison-Bleue) are fixing a satellite in orbit, when they are attacked by a big CGI nanomachine storm. It kills Marcus and Harper barely escapes with the unconscious Fowler. Back on Earth, Harper is disgraced as nobody believes his incredible story and he loses his family, etc.

Ten years later, NASA has discovered that the moon has broken orbit, and we only have a few months or ... weeks till it destroys the Earth. They corrected the estimate from months to weeks, because "as the moon gets closer, the months will get shorter". Wow; that is "do your own research" level thinking, as our clocks and calendars wouldn't change just because lunar months had drastically changed. No matter, full on panic, Director of NASA quits, tosses his badge to Fowler (now working as Asst Dir) and tells her to go look something up in the Top Secret Files, where she bumps into the man who carried out the biggest coverup in history (slumming Donald Sutherland, Astro Boy), when they hid the fact that lights had been seen from inside the moon, during the first moon landing. And yes, they knew that Harper had seen the alien nanoswarm, but also covered that up. Why? Who knows, don't matter.

Meanwhile harmless conspiracy theorist KC Houseman (John Bradley, Game of Thrones) breaks into a scientist's lab to steal data and then releases the "proof" about the moon's impending crash on Twitter. The ENTIRE... WORLD... BELIEVES... HIM. The cat is out of the bag and the world instantly begins looting Walmarts. Moon Panic !!! But that's alright, Fowler has a plan.

Time becomes somewhat fuzzy, probably because... The Moon (!!!) and they are fast-track a launch using, which gets derailed by equipment failures and Fowler sending everyone home (I kid you not), and then a giant Moon Wave, but that's alright because Harper, Fowler and Houseman are still around to go into space and defeat the Moon Monster with an experimental EMP device, via an old museum housed Space Shuttle with an experimental Chinese lander/buggy that ... doesn't use electronics? You see (and I am already past the point where recapping the movie sounds like a fever dream of a FreeDumb Trucker), the Moon Monster is attracted to electronics, and apparently old Space Shuttles can be flown without electronics, and for some reason the Chinese had developed technology that runs... without electronics? Maybe its the same technology the Moon Nazis use? 

They believe, that by defeating the Moon Monster, it will allow the Moon to course correct, because, the Moon is in fact ("...that's no Moon. It's a space station...") a giant "megastructure", basically a DysonSphere that the Moon Monster is sabotaging because... ? Oh yeah, because the Moon Monster was created by a precursor race of humans who lost control of their AI and it went Evil, as they are wont to do, and they had to create Moons to travel the cosmos and seed other star systems with their own DNA. We were the only one with successfully completed "seeding". We learn all this when our intrepid team goes inside the Moon and meets its own Not Evil AI. Together they all save the Moon and the Earth. And they all lived Happily Ever After, including Fuzz Aldrin.

Despite my mockery, and probably more because I have the opportunity to do so, I loved this movie. Sure, it had SyFy / Asylum level plotting and acting but the production values more than allowed us to ignore that. It was almost as much a gonzo good time as Godzilla vs Kong. I wonder what my rewatch recap will be like.

The only thing that disappointed me was that it was more a scifi actioner, than disaster movie, as most of the disaster material happens in the background as they rush from one scene to the next. The Human Element is relegated to a rather tiresome chase in Aspen as Harper & Fowler's families (and inserted Chinese Exchange Student -- funding secured !) run from looters and Moon Gravity.