MOONFALL

UG UG. ME GO UG UG. SPOILERS. UG.

Every so often, about every six or seven years, Roland Emmerich gets it into his head to absolutely trash the world. A mere city being stomped on by Godzilla isn't enough: a dozen cities obliterated by giant alien warships on Independence Day isn't enough, the entire planet's climate systems being upended in The Day After Tomorrow isn't enough, absolutely everything getting smashed in 2012 isn't enough, the giant alien warships turning up again and dropping whole cities onto other whole cities in Independence Day: Resurgence isn't enough. (Let's not forget his onetime creative partner Dean Devlin's go with the almighty Geostorm.) Between planetary annihilations he'll trash smaller things: the White House, the island of Midway or William Shakespeare. But right now he's blowing up absolutely everything yet again in Moonfall, the stupidest thing you ever saw that didn't have Mr Blobby in it.

Ten years ago a routine satellite repair mission went horribly wrong when a space globule thing smashed into their shuttle, killing one of the three astronauts. Halle Berry (who was unconscious at the time) gets promoted while the only actual eyewitness Patrick Wilson is thrown out of NASA. Now his life's a complete wreck: behind on the rent, out of work and estranged from his family, because the higher the stakes the sharper the redemptive arc. Then passing janitor, conspiracy wacko and IBS sufferer John Bradley suddenly discovers that the moon is out of orbit and will smash into Earth in less than three weeks. The military want to nuke the moon (even though the fallout would kill everybody) but Berry comes up with a crazy scheme that Just Might Work, until they get to the moon and discover the amazing/ludicrous truth about what's inside the moon and where it came from. Meanwhile the families and exes are trekking through mountains and wastelands in order to reach some hope of safety...

It's a bit like Gravity, a bit like Contact, a bit like Mission To Mars, a bit like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a bit like Armageddon (or Deep Impact), and a bit like Kill The Moon, the episode of Doctor Who in which the moon is revealed to be an egg (an episode so dumb that I walked away from Who until showrunner Steven Moffatt and godawful companion Clara Oswald had gone - my younger self had happily accepted the idiocies of Old Who when Sylvester McCoy was being chased round Studio Three by a nine-foot liquorice allsort but as a grown adult This Has Gone Too Far). Everything is CGId into absolute pixel-perfect oblivion, with earthquakes and volcanoes and gravity reversals (the Earth gets shaken about more than the snowglobe that keeps appearing, doubtless symbolically) and demented car chases featuring impossible stunts that would get you 250 bonus points in Grand Theft Auto. None of it's real and none of it's plausible, the dialogue is terrible, and I don't care whether NASA approved it or not.

Moonfall makes that episode of Doctor Who look like Woody Allen, and not the early funny ones either. It is the apex of stupidity, the apotheosis of dumb, the ne plus ultra of knuckleheaded WTFery. It is a film about artificial intelligence that is certainly artificial but that's as far as it goes. It is a film of literal lunacy. And yet it is still terrific popcorn fun in a park-your-brain-at-the-door kind of way: gosh-wow wham-bam whizz-bang destructoporn of the highest (?) order. It's not mean-spirited or offensive, it's not banging any political drum, it has no message beyond "better the weirdos than the nuke-happy military", and most importantly it is not about anything but battering your retinas and your cerebral cortex to a pulp for two hours, an aim in which it succeeded. I think I quite enjoyed it.

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