Moonfall: a blockbuster that takes off well, but loses its trajectory (critic)

Our opinion on Roland Emmerich's disaster film, to be (re)watched this Sunday evening on TF1. With Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and the Moon that threatens to hit us.

At the start of 2022, Roland Emmerich gave us another Independence Day disaster film with Moonfall, recounting, as its title effectively sums it up, the sudden fall of the Moon on the Earth. Verdict? On the occasion of its broadcast on the first channel, we share our review again.

There, like that, what was the best moment ofIndependence Day: Resurgence ? This is not a question that comes out of nowhere, since a new work by Roland Emmerich is arriving unencrypted on television this Sunday evening. And so, if you're waiting for the answer to the question, well, it was surely (since it's also our only memory of the film, it must be true) about this moment where the titanic alien queen chases the hero in the desert.

Not a triumph of design, but a real triumph of scale: we felt the colossal presence of the creature, its gigantism, its presence in the shot… At that moment, we felt that Roland Emmerich had perfectly succeeded in his cinematic objective: to provoke , if only for a moment, a sincere amazement. This astonishment, Moonfall only manages to touch on it, despite its subject which conjures it with all its wishes: the Moon is leaving its orbit and will crash into the Earth.

The beginning of the film is promising. A space mission is attacked by a column of dark matter, intelligent and threatening, emerging from the Moon… This is precisely the occasion for a beautiful play on scale, with this lunar explosion that we see in the reflection of an astronaut's helmet. Then, ten years later, the former astronauts of this mission (Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson) must save the Earth from the fall of the Moon with the help of a pseudo-scientist.

A program that could be described as “classic and no surprises”, but which works very well in its first part, as long as the film is limited to following the countdown of a disaster film aimed at excitement, pleasure, astonishment. The vision of the increasingly gigantic lunar globe in the Californian sky, a tidal wave caused by a surge of gravity, the inexorable sensation of total destruction… This works completely as long as the trajectory of the film wants to be that of a spectacular blockbuster – on the scale of its ambitions, therefore.

All this gradually collapses during the last third of the film, which precipitates Moonfall in the field of the most delirious science fiction, by explaining the true nature of the Moon, and in passing remaking the history of humanity over millennia to the detriment of cinematic common sense (and also plundering the finale of 2001, A Space Odyssey that of Mission to Mars, It needs to be done). As if it were leaving its orbit, the pleasant trajectory that it had outlined at the start, the disaster film is in fact divided into two interlocking narrative arcs: one on the ground, following a band of survivors seeking to escape from the fall of the Moon, and the other in the air, which becomes a metaphysical galactic odyssey. The terrestrial adventure is too lazy and the one in space is too absurd. The combination of the two doesn't really work: Moonfall suffers in short from a problem of scale.

Not just scale, actually. The real hero of the film, KC (the likeable John Bradley, seen in Game Of Thrones), an expert in “megastructures” claiming that the Moon is an alien artifact, is right against NASA scientists and the entire establishment who consider him a crackpot. It's such a cliché that it would almost end up no longer being seen, but in reality – especially in these times of worrying distrust towards scientific bodies – it's starting to be seen very well. And this is usual with Emmerich, who finds most of his subjects in the shelves of pseudo-science, of his excellent Stargate (aliens built the pyramids) at its least excellent 2012 (the Mayan calendar is right about the end of the world) passing by Anonymous who said that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays. Why have we complicated the task in this way when it was enough to make the sky fall on our heads? Perhaps because Emmerich paradoxically finds it too easy. When will there be a disaster film where the heroes are real scientists, and must first fight against media charlatans? Ah, we are told in the headset that Don't Look Up has just been nominated for an Oscar for Best Film and Best Screenplay. Like what !

Which movie violates the most laws of physics between Moonfall and Armageddon?