Set your expectation meter for Emmerich, and you’ll find it sufficiently mindlessly entertaining; that is, until it takes a wackadoo alien turn that no suspension of disbelief, with a modicum of intelligence, can accept. It’s a patchwork of The Abyss, 2021, and Armageddon stitched together with sophomoric dialogue and slapdash plotting. When George Bailey told Mary that he would “throw a lasso around [the moon],” little did he know what that would mean for the earth. Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster porn movie is MOONFALL, starring Patrick Wilson, Halle Barry, and Game of Thrones‘ John Bradley. Emmerich’s offering is everything you typically expect from a disaster movie, and then some. And it’s the and then some that may lose your interest in anything that is going on. What works? The disaster porn and the chemistry between our three leads. What doesn’t? About everything else. But we don’t watch these melodramatic disaster movies for the story, plot, or characters; we watch them for the sheer ridiculousness of it all, and a chance to turn off our brains for a couple of hours. While you won’t care about any of the supporting characters, you will be interested in what fate has in store for our three leads. The press screening I attended was in IMAX, and a premium format is precisely how you should watch this movie. Do not wait to watch it on streaming (on which, it will likely soon be available), because most of the fun of this movie is the entertainment value of the larger than life disaster effects.

Oh, for my fellow Star Trek: the Next Generation fans, you’ll appreciate the Dyson Sphere reference.

Ryan teaches Film Studies and Digital Citizenship at the University of Tampa. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Interested in Ryan making a guest appearance on your podcast or contributing to your website? Send him a DM on Twitter or email him at RLTerry1@gmail.com! If you’re ever in Tampa or Orlando, feel free to catch a movie with him.

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