I saw Moonfall at a theater in Milwaukee yesterday. It was delightfully stupid, which is what you get when you see a Roland Emmerich movie. So the premise of the movie is that the moon falls out of orbit and starts to fall toward Earth. You probably already know that. And you might be wondering how mankind fixes this. The moon is pretty massive so it's not like we can just push it. So I'll explain the plot for anyone curious who doesn't want to see the full movie.
Here are the main characters. They're all pretty much stock characters with bland backstories.
Brian Harper -- Formerly prominent astronaut who fell from grace after a fatal accident and nobody believed his story.
KC Houseman -- Guy who knows exactly what's going on but nobody believes him
Jocinda Fowler -- High ranking initially skeptical bureaucrat (director of NASA).
Brenda Lopez -- Protagonist's estranged ex-wife.
Tom Lopez -- Ex-wife's new husband who hates the protagonist but eventually learns to respect him.
General Jenkins -- High ranking general who has a military solution to the crisis, which all the protagonists know will only make things worse. He has no first name -- he only exists as a stock character and does not need one.
General Doug Davidson -- High ranking general who is uneasy about the military solution to the crisis.
Holdenfield -- Grizzled old guy who has known about a government coverup that has been going on for a really long time.
Also, there is a lot of weird product placement for Kaspersky Labs in the movie.
Okay, so now on to the plot.
In 2011, astronauts Jo Fowler and Brian Harper are in space trying to repair a satellite. There's a third guy there too. Some big swarm of nanobots flies out from inside the moon and attacks the group. Third guy dies, Jo is knocked unconscious, and Brian manages to get back to the shuttle and pilot it back to Earth.
10 years later, somebody is watching The Exposition Channel on TV. It is revealed that Brian was fired and his reputation trashed because of the guy getting killed and his insistence that a nanobot swarm caused the destruction in space.
KC Houseman is a self proclaimed superstructurist -- part of a fringe group that believes the moon is actually a massive structure built by aliens. Of course everybody thinks he's a nutcase and of course he turns out to be right. By somehow getting easy access to a powerful observatory telescope in Italy, he finds out that the moon has fallen out of orbit. He tries to warn NASA but they don't believe him because the government is never allowed to believe the early discoverers in this situation.
A couple days later, NASA director Jo Fowler discovers that he is right and now the government is working hard on the problem. They somehow plan and launch the only space shuttle in a single day. Also they reach the moon in about 6 hours. Three no-name astronauts are on this mission. Their names are not important because we already know that their only purpose is to die and make the government even more desperate. You think the script writers have time for trivial things like naming doomed characters?
So after this failure, the top military brass come up with some plan to fix the moon by shooting a bunch of nukes at it. At no point in the movie does anybody explain how this is supposed to work. The protagonists do mention several times that this will irradiate the planet.
Also there's some boring subplot about the children of Jo, and the children of Brian, try to reach some NORAD bunker. That part is just an excuse to have a lot of high octane driving and fleeing scenes. Also, at some spots, the moon fucks up Earth's gravity and people can jump higher. It enters the atmosphere at some point and starts stripping it away, so people cannot breathe.
Jo goes deep into the NASA archives where grizzled old guy Holdenfield (played by Donald Sutherland and featured pretty prominently in the trailers) delivers some exposition and makes passing mention of some military project that was scrapped in the 80s. Jo finds out about this project, which turns out to be an EMP bomb, and decides that the thing causing all these problems is some kind of machine and if they get up there and detonate it, everything will go back to normal.
So now things get weird.
So Jo, KC, and Brian all go up to the moon. They find a hole that leads inside the moon and go down it. There they find some huge structure. The swarm starts to chase them and eventually they reach some sort of building and get pulled in by a green tractor beam.
Inside, Brian meets the Exposition 3000 which tells them what's going on. Billions of years ago, a super advanced society created a utopia based around these megastructures and governed by an artificial intelligence which then went all Skynet and tried to kill everyone. So the aliens created a bunch of moons. Then they flew one of the moons out near our solar system and created Earth. Then they seeded Earth with life to make their species continue. The big AI nanobot swarm killed everyone else and destroyed the other moons.
You see, the moon is actually a big space station built around a white dwarf star that the aliens captured. When the nanobot swarm found it, it started devouring the star somehow and that's what made the moon fall out of orbit. Apparently the moon wasn't staying in orbit by its own gravity; it needed constant maintenance.
At some point, there's a scene of New York getting destroyed by the encroaching moon, but somehow the Freedom Tower is completely unharmed. I guess it would upset people if the World Trade Center's replacement were depicted as being destroyed.
Anyway, the moon gets close enough to Earth that it's actually making direct contact with mountains yet somehow the entire planet isn't destroyed. The protagonists get close to the nanobot swarm and detonate the EMP bomb. KC makes the obligatory heroic sacrifice to do it. With the swarm gone, the alien software somehow pulls the moon back to its proper orbit.
Also, Tom, the new husband of the protagonist's ex-wife dies. This was required so that the protagonist had a chance to get back together with his ex-wife. Can't do that with a pesky new man in the way.
So that's it. A bunch of stock characters and predictable cliches. Stupid, but still, I was entertained.
Wow, that is somehow even more silly than a similar bit in Invader Zim: