December 28, 2022
Disgraced astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and his former work partner, now NASA deputy director Jocinda "Jo" Fowler (Halle Berry) reunite to respond to a pressing apocalyptic emergency announced by eccentric conspiracy theorist "Dr." K.C. Houseman (John Bradley) who discovered that the Moon has gone out of its usual orbit and was moving closer to Earth, causing worldwide tsunamis, earthquakes, gravitational and atmospheric anomalies.
Ronald Emmerich is very well-known for all the mega-blockbuster disaster movies he had written and directed before, like "Independence Day" (1996), "Godzilla" (1998), "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004), "2012" (2009) and "Independence Day: Resurgence" (2016). In his latest movie, the Earth is again being bombarded by destructive calamities, this time brought about by a most outrageous circumstance involving the Moon.
There was also time spent following the story of one family as they try to survive. This time, we follow Harper's estranged son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) driving to Colorado to meet his mother Brenda (Carolina Bartczak) and her new family with second husband Tom Lopez (Michael Pena). Their eyebrow-raising, eyeball-rolling adventure include a shoot-out with bad guys and a jumping a car over a chasm through a snow storm.
Patrick Wilson always made a good flawed hero figure. His Brian Harper was doing some fancy spaceship counter-maneuvering against a space monster even after 10 years of forced retirement, yet somehow he makes us believe that he can still do it. On the other hand, an uncomfortable Halle Berry looked awkward and unconvincing in her role as Jo Fowler, as an astronaut, and even more so as a top NASA official.
My favorite cast member was the delightful John Bradley, whom I only knew before as Samwell Tarly in "Game of Thrones." His Dr. Houseman was an astronaut-wannabe who sincerely believed that the Moon was an artificial megastructure created by alien intelligence. I felt his jumble of conflicting emotions at that moment when he was called to join Harper on his mission, as well as in his final scene with his cat Fuzz Aldrin and his grandmother.
To get through this movie, you need to just let all those fancy highfalutin astrophysics theories and jargon fly over your head and simply go with the flow of the action. There may have been no logical scientific basis to anything happening on Earth or on the Moon in this excessively CGI-overloaded film, but it was very consistent with Emmerich's grand vision of entertaining and exhilarating his insatiable adrenaline-junkie fans. 6/10.
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