Film / Moonfall

I see a bad moon a-risin'...

"This planet has suffered five extinctions. This is going to be the sixth."

Moonfall is a 2022 Science Fiction Disaster Movie co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich.

A mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit and sends it hurtling on a collision course with Earth. With mere weeks before impact and the world on the brink of annihilation, NASA executive and former astronaut Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) is convinced she has the key to saving us all – but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (John Bradley) believe her. These unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love... only to find out that our Moon is not what we think it is.

The cast also includes Charlie Plummer, Michael Peña and Donald Sutherland.

The film was released on February 4, 2022. For the trailer, see here.

Fandango MovieClips provided the first five minutes of the movie here.

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Moonfall provides examples of:

• Achilles' Heel: Played with. The A.I. swarm attacks the humans only when it detects them using electrical systems, meaning the protagonists are able to escape it several times by powering down everything. However, it also means it won't swallow the E.M.P. bomb that will kill it, as without humans it doesn't register as a threat - leading K.C. to stay behind to draw it in then activate the bomb.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Brian is shown a projection of how ancient humans were destroyed by their own A.I. assistants, but they were able to create a more benevolent A.I. to power the seed ships such as the Moon.
• Almost Out of Oxygen: The atmosphere starts being stripped away as the Moon passes ever-closer to the planet, forcing survivors to find oxygen supplies to ride it out until the Moon passes by and the air returns.
• Apocalypse Anarchy: The moon is falling towards the earth, everyone's gonna die but people have still gone bandit doing the "our car broke down" gambit to steal a second one.
• The Ark: The Moon is an unmanned probe designed to find a suitable solar system, create a new world, then seed it with human life.
• Armies Are Evil: Though nominally trying to save Earth, the nuke-happy US military mostly acts as a secondary antagonist to the heroes' less world-ending plans.
• Artistic License – Engineering: During the launch, one of the boosters cuts out mid-burn. This is physically impossible for a solid rocket booster to do - there are no parts that can fail that would stop the booster from burning, and the reaction involved generates its own oxygen, so the fuel will continue to burn even in the absence of atmospheric oxygen. The only way a solid rocket booster stops burning is when it's out of fuel.
• Artistic License – Physics: Roland Emmerich never cared much about scientific accuracy in his movies, but Moonfall might well be his most egregious display to date.
  • One of the worst examples is the whole "Luna is a Dyson Sphere" business. White dwarfs are small compared to regular main sequence stars, but they're still roughly the size of Earth (even the smallest one known to date is somewhat larger than the Moon) and thus far too big to fit inside a moon-sized megastructure that's dozens, if not hundreds of times larger than the star it encapsulates. And then there's the fact that a white dwarf's diminutive size doesn't change a thing about its star-level mass. Despite the original star losing a lot of its mass in the process of its evolution, an average white dwarf remains at a mass comparable to that of the Sun - many millions of times heavier than the Moon. Needless to say, this setup would entail all the crushing gravity shenanigans this would imply when orbiting Earth at a lunar distance (not to mention that, given how gravity works, Earth would be orbiting the Moon in this case and not the other way around). The gravity issue might be handwaved as some sort of containment failure, given the arbitrary jump in gravity halfway through the film.
  • At one point a character mentions that Luna's gravity has jumped to 80% that of Earth. Putting aside the fact that such a sudden change requires some serious handwaving, even with Luna directly above the Gravity Screw wouldn't be strong enough to cancel out Earth's gravitational pull, let alone make stuff fall into the sky absent any external force. It still does exactly that, including tearing giant chunks of rock out of the ground. Of course, named characters on Earth always act like their personal gravity is only slightly and temporarily reduced while everything around them goes flying, including a scene of two guys bouncing around like they're on the moon.
  • The ending of the movie has the heroes reunite with their loved ones under a clear blue sky, which would be an impossible climatological event given the amount of debris rained down onto Earth. Given that mountain-sized chunks of the Moon's crust were detaching to de-orbit onto the planet, the resulting impact winter from so much detritus being kicked up into the atmosphere would probably finish off any chances Earth has of being able to recover from the Moon deorbiting. That doesn't even go into the effects the Moon friction scraping against the Earth's atmosphere would do to anything still living on Earth, or even the loss of atmosphere from the Moon siphoning it away.
  • All the nukes on the planet, times a hundred, would do exactly jack squat to the moon.
  • At one point a scientist says the moons orbit is going into "an ellipse". The moon's orbit is already an ellipse. All repeating orbits are ellipses. A perfectly circular orbit is an ellipse with one focal point. What they meant or should have said was that the moon was "spiraling towards the Earth".
• Artistic License – Space:
  • At the beginning of the movie, Bryan is able to see the swarm kicking up a plume of dust with the naked eye from Low Earth Orbit as it digs into the lunar surface. The thing is, if he could see it, so could everyone else, and it would be quite noticeable, immediately lending credence to his claims that the 'Endeavor' was attacked.
  • A scientist near the beginning of the movie states that, as the Moon's orbit decreases, it would shorten the number of months down. Not all societies operate off of a lunar month system, though the most prominent group that still does would be Muslims, but instead a calendar based on days, and it is never explained whether or not the Moon's shifting orbit would even affect Earth's own rotation.
• Asshole Victim: The thieves who steal Sonny's van and later attempt to rob Tom's place end up chasing them all as the gravity shift starts causing the ground to break apart. The leader of the thieves is crushed by debris while the remaining two crash and burn against a large chunk of mass.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: K.C. justifies his decision to sacrifice himself to save Brian because Brian was the first person to truly believe in him.
• Benevolent A.I.: The moon has one of these, fighting a war against a rogue A.I..
• Big Bad: The A.I. Swarm is the one who causes the impending mooncrash towards Earth and is the main threat of the film.
• Bowdlerize: The graffiti on the side of the rocket saying “Fuck the Moon” is changed to “Screw the Moon” in the trailer.
• Brain Uploading: Following his Heroic Sacrifice in the climax, K.C.'s consciousness is uploaded into the A.I. in the moon.
• Brick Joke:
  • One of K.C's acolytes spouts a deranged sounding theory that the moon megastructure actually grows produce, prompting an exasperated Brian to threaten to throw him out a window. Once inside the megastructure, we see that there are indeed fields dedicated to crops, and Brian can only admit he was right, despite smoking a ton of weed.
  • During one of the film's more impressive scenes, the top half of the Chrysler Building goes flying thanks to Gravity Screw. It makes another appearance after the Final Battle, much to the characters' amusement.
• The Cameo: Donald Sutherland gets prominent billing including his own And Starring entry in the credits, but he only appears in a single scene that lasts for all of two minutes.
• Cassandra Truth: After Brian's last mission with NASA, he was dismissed as crazy and the accident blamed on pilot error and a solar flare rather than the nanites attacking the ship. As it turns out, NASA knew fine well that something was up with the moon and scapegoated Brian rather than let the truth panic everyone.
• Chekhov's Gun: Sonny gets a pretty classical one to protect his family. Once scene shows him hiding it from a group who tries to rob him, only for him to retrieve it and use it against them later.
• Closest Thing We Got: After most of the flight crew evacuate in the belief that the mission is a failure when one of the shuttle's engines is damaged, Brian, Jo and K.C. have to take the shuttle up themselves as the only ones left on the base, even thought K.C. isn't a qualified astronaut.
• Colony Drop: Due to the influence of the A.I. swarm, the Moon is on a descending orbit with Earth, shedding millions of tons of rocks as meteors in the atmosphere.
• Combat Tentacles: The A.I. swarm sprouts giant liquid metal-like tentacles when it attacks, both small enough to kill individual astronauts and large enough to almost crush Brian and Jo's ship.
• Complexity Addiction: The Precursors apparently had a serious case of one. When their AI turned against them, their plan to fight back consisted of building moon-sized mobile megastructures around white dwarf stars (which they might've even created themselves) and send them out into the universe to create new planets from scratch so that one day mankind could be reborn from the precursors' gene seed... which did nothing to actually harm their genocidal foe. In contrast, the humans on Earth just built a simple EMP bomb decades ago that fries the nanite swarm nice and crispy. Why the hyper-advanced precursors never thought of this most obvious of solutions is anyone's guess.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Tom dies when the oxygen canister on one of his daughters fails during a period of atmospheric disturbance, so he swaps canisters with her and sacrifices himself so she can make it to safety. Just a couple minutes later, the atmosphere goes back to normal, once K.C. kills the Big Bad.
• Disaster Movie: It's a Roland Emmerich flick. Of course it would be one of these.
• Dyson Sphere: The Moon is actually a megastructure surrounding a white dwarf star that serves as its power source.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Jo gets the idea to recommission the derelict Endeavour to go to the moon when she sees her son's toy shuttle.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend:
  • When NASA evacuates all its personnel from the Endeavour launch site, two techs stay behind and prove invaluable in getting the mission back on track. They die when their evac helicopter gets caught in a Gravity Screw-fueled tidal wave and are never mentioned again, with the main characters instantly forgetting they ever existed.
  • Jo's ex-husband has a pretty significant supporting role. He also doesn't make it out alive. When Jo's son laments that they didn't manage to reach him in time, Jo literally tells the boy it's okay and it doesn't matter.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The A.I. controlling the moon megastructure appears to Brian as his son, Sonny. Later it appears to KC as his mother.
• Gravity Screw: As the moon descends further into Earth's orbit, its gravity suddenly increases to 80% that of Earth, causing all sorts of reverse-gravity effects such as the water from the oceans being sucked vertically into the sky.
• Hell Is That Noise: The mysterious black mass emits a weird, glitchy sound whenever it's attacking.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Brian fully plans to do this to defeat the swarm, but K.C. beats him to the punch, entering the pod while he's arguing with Jo about the decision.
  • When her oxygen supply runs out, Tom gives his daughter his and encourages her to keep walking to safety even as he suffocates.
• Historical In-Joke: The trailer starts with an excerpt of John F. Kennedy's "We choose to go to the Moon". The same Moon that is about to collide with Earth. This is reflected in the movie's Tag Line; "In the year 2022, the Moon will come to us."
• Humanity Came from Space: Upon visiting the Moon, Brian learns that Earth was seeded by a race of advanced ancient humans who were destroyed by their own A.I. systems.
• Knight in Sour Armor: After his career and personal life crumble when the swarm attacks Endeavour, Brian becomes cynical, bitter, withdrawn from his family and Jo, mildly alcoholic and is generally a mess. Even when the magnitude of the disaster becomes apparent he almost walks out several times - but when the chips are down he goes the distance to save everything.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Averted then played straight. While Brian will fly the Endeavour, he has dedicated crewmates for flight operations and military passengers for operating the E.M.P. bomb, with Jo and K.C. remaining on the ground. Then the moon's effects on the gravity force everyone to evacuate as the shuttle engines are damaged, before the leads have a Crazy Enough to Work moment that leads to the three of them taking the shuttle up.
• Monumental Damage: Luna's final pass (close enough to nearly scratch the Earth's surface) takes off the top half of the Chrysler Building and deposits it mostly intact halfway around the world. The Empire State Building is also shown being struck by flying rubble, though it seems to make its way through the scrape reasonably intact. Completely and very amusingly averted in the case of One World Trade Center, which can be seen standing proud and being completely missed by all the flying debris that's being pelted through pretty much every other building around it.
• More Expendable Than You: KC sacrifices himself in Brian's place because he reasons that Brian, having had direct contact with the Lunar A.I., needs to share that information and thus can't die.
• Plot-Demanded Manual Mode: The EMP can be remotely detonated, but the AI swarm won't get close enough to it because it doesn't consider technology by itself worth attacking, only targeting objects which also have a human presence. A human therefore must manually detonate the bomb, serving as bait to draw the swarm in.
• Precision F-Strike: A spoken one from KC when he first gets wind of the unusual lunar activity, and then the heroes find "Fuck the moon" spray-painted on an old rocket.
• Precursors: The human race as we know it is the second coming of humanity, seeded on earth by an advanced human empire annihilated by its own A.I. creation, with only the moon megastructure remaining as their legacy.
• Product Placement: To an almost nauseating degree. Elon Musk and his SpaceX projects get not one but at least four shout-outs, Tom prominently sells Lexus cars, Kaspersky has a giant billboard prominently displayed and apparently also provides network security for orbital SpaceX refueling stations, and so on and so forth.
• Ragnarök Proofing: the technology inside the moon has kept right on ticking for 4 billion years or so.
• Ring World Planet: In the projection shown to Brian we saw a ringworld habitat.
• Rock Beats Laser: The A.I. attacking ships that approach the Moon cannot detect them properly if there are no active electronics, which allows Brian to 'sneak up' on the Moon using an older space shuttle and carefully making manual manoeuvres.
• Sequel Hook: After K.C.'s Heroic Sacrifice, it turns out that his consciousness has been stored, and the Benevolent A.I. tells K.C. that it's time for him to get to work.
• Shout-Out: When they get separated, K.C. calls for Brian Harper using his first and last names.
  Fowler: How many Brians do you think are in the moon?
  • The Endeavour launch site is hit by an earthquake as the moon gets closer which damages some of the equipment, likely a reference to When Worlds Collide.
  • The wallpaper pattern of the retro-themed hotel that KC, Brian, and the conspiracy theorists take shelter in is the exact same as the floor pattern in the hotel from The Shining (albeit a different colour), a nod to both the aforementioned film and the conspiracy theory that the moon landing was faked and directed by Stanley Kubrick.
• Someone Has to Die: The A.I. swarm specifically reacts to a human presence in proximity to some kind of active technology. This means the EMP will only work if someone detonates it manually.
• Trailers Always Spoil: Neither the trailers nor the posters attempt to hide the fact that Earth's moon isn't actually a moon but an artificial megastructure. Most of the film's suspense and plot twists tend to fizzle out pathetically thanks to it.
• Uncertain Doom: The last we see of General Davidson and the other Chiefs of Staff is their bunker collapsing as it is hit with a literal mountain of Moon debris. We are not shown whether or not anyone survived.
• You Are in Command Now: Jo basically inherits the position of NASA administrator after the previous one says Screw This, I'm Outta Here and flees to get his family to safety.

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