131 min | PG-13 | February 4, 2022 | Lionsgate
The moon falls out of orbit and starts dropping toward Earth. A disgraced astronaut, a fired NASA boss, and a conspiracy blogger are the only people who can stop it. Roland Emmerich destroys the planet again and forgets to bring the fun this time.
The moon leaves its orbit and begins a slow fall toward Earth. Roland Emmerich builds the film around that single image and the cascade of tidal waves, lunar debris, and gravity storms it triggers. The real subject is conspiracy as salvation. A disgraced astronaut, a fired NASA administrator, and a basement theorist turn out to be the only people who understand what is happening, while every official institution fails. Emmerich treats expertise and credentials as obstacles and reserves the truth for the outcasts who refuse to stop looking up.
Halle Berry plays Jocinda Fowler as a NASA executive who trades a desk for a cockpit, and she commits to the technical jargon with a straight face the script does not earn. Patrick Wilson plays Brian Harper as the washed-up pilot dragged back into the mission, all jaw and grievance. The two actors generate professional competence and no chemistry. John Bradley plays KC Houseman, the conspiracy blogger who proves correct, and he supplies the only human texture in the film. Bradley plays panic and wonder as if he actually believes the moon is coming, and his terror grounds scenes that the leads play like a NASA press release. Donald Sutherland appears for a single scene of cryptic exposition and then vanishes.
Emmerich co-writes with Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen, and the script keeps three storylines moving by cutting away the instant any one threatens to develop. The visual effects render the moon as a cracked sphere trailing rock and dust, and the compositions of it filling the sky are the strongest thing the film offers. The score by Kloser and Thomas Wander pushes every beat toward awe whether the image has earned it or not. The editing favors momentum over geography, so the ground-level escape sequences blur together while the spacecraft scenes lose all sense of distance and scale. Production design splits between sleek mission-control surfaces and a generic apocalypse of flipped cars and flooded highways.
Emmerich has made this film before and made it better. The pieces are familiar from his earlier disaster pictures, and here they arrive without the conviction that once held them together. The premise is absurd, and the film never decides whether to play that absurdity straight or wink at it. The result lands in the gap between sincere spectacle and knowing camp, committed to neither. There is a loud, silly, watchable movie buried in the wreckage, and Emmerich keeps cutting away from it.