Even the Disaster Movie King Couldn’t Make This Star-Studded 2022 Sci-Fi a Box Office Hit

After making movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, director Roland Emmerich made a name for himself that’s practically synonymous with the disaster movie. His classic films featured massive casts and bigger spectacles with visual calling cards that gave the movies an immediate weight. The image of the Statue of Liberty buried in an ice storm for The Day After Tomorrow was even the film’s poster. If the disaster movie genre is an excuse to put movie stars through horrific but still imaginable (if unbelievable) scenarios, Emmerich mastered it. While his career has explored other avenues over the years, he could still meet the gigantic scale that viewers could find in those films. But even the modern master of disaster movies may have lost some of his touch, as evidenced by his 2022 box office bomb, Moonfall grossed less than $70 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

While The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day had cryptic titles that suggested just something of the awesome might the movies contained, Moonfall immediately reveals what’s happening in the movie: the moon is falling. If Emmerich’s other disaster movies could let you live with a brief but acceptable explanation for the disaster (global warming, alien invasions), Moonfall demands an even greater suspension of disbelief. Part of its problem is that it feels the need to justify its premise with a bafflingly convoluted sci-fi explanation when a simple “the moon is falling” would have sufficed. But most importantly, Moonfall lacks the human moments that grounded Emmerich’s other films.

‘Moonfall’ Lacks The Simplicity That Made Roland Emmerich’s Other Disaster Movies So Memorable

Image via Lionsgate

Roland Emmerich began his career making sci-fi movies in West Germany, with an eye on the blockbuster prize. In 2008, CNN reported on his “obsession with special effects and monumental disasters; explosions, floods, tidal waves, and general destruction, both alien and earthly,” even in film school days, and those passions animated his work when he was courted by Hollywood producers in the early 1990s. While movies like Stargate, Independence Day, and his often-derided supersized Godzilla film in 1998 drew negative responses from critics, they suggested a filmmaker who knew his audience well. They represent some of the biggest blockbuster filmmaking of their time, with a robust sense of scale and a desire to impress. Even later films like the Mel Gibson Revolutionary War epic The Patriot impart that, but Emmerich’s whole career lives in that space.

But the innate satisfaction of looking at explosions and theoretical destruction has a limit, and while spectacle could make a movie like Moonfall still work, it’s mostly committed to explaining the premise at the expense of the fun. In this case, the moon is not just the moon, but a hollow Dyson sphere structure meant to transport humanity’s ancestors from their home planet to Earth millions of years ago. The AI they built to serve them went rogue, ultimately destroying the star at its center. And while the pseudoscience of Emmerich’s other films might leave plenty to be desired, the movies still worked on the immediate dramatic level. With Moonfall, this exposition just distracts from what viewers want to see: giant waves, lights going out, mass destruction.

‘Moonfall’ Fell Apart For Other Reasons

Lucky for the Earthlings of Moonfall, its heroes are astronauts. Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) is the disgraced one, who bore witness to an alien attack in space some years before and was effectively disavowed from NASA after disclosing his findings. Brian’s arc isn’t unusual for the protagonist of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie, hitting its familial struggle beats with a rote disinterest that might make viewers long for the sincerity of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. His professional and personal lives were stunted by his belief in extraterrestrial life, and the only person who believes him is the movie’s most dated stereotype of a character, the conspiracy theorist K.C. (John Bradley), a nerd who lives at home and worships Elon Musk.

Shot during the early days of COVID-19, the movie was likely somewhat marred by two weeks of production being cut due to budgetary reasons. Speaking with VFXVoice, Emmerich claimed that the COVID protocols cost the movie shooting days as well as money, which could also speak to why the piece as a whole is fairly weak. Even with great actors like Wilson and Halle Berry, the movie lacks any of the stirring qualities audiences got from, say, Will Smith’s Captain Steve Hiller in Independence Day. The big effects scenes feel indifferent, and the nature of the plot is so convoluted that it’s hard to just turn your brain off and enjoy. Emmerich has yet to make a movie since the failure of Moonfall, but the big-budget disaster movie is a genre Hollywood can excel in — hopefully, he’s able to reclaim his title.