Your moon asplodes!

A quiet moment of intense drama...

In the grand tradition of Exploding Sun and Ring of Fire and CAT. 8, the other night Wonder Wife and I dipped into the well of truly awful disaster movies, this time a big-budget version from a master of big, dumb movies, Roland Emmerich: Moonfall. And I gotta tell ya, it was big, and it was dumb. Mind-numbingly stupid. So bad I have returned to bad-movie reviewing, which I generally try to avoid.

So, the premise is that the moon is actually a mega-structure, a fact which the government has at least suspected, if not known, since 1969. It is also the site of an ongoing battle between an evil AI entity (that looks like a swarm of metal shavings) and and a good AI that is a the last remaining artifact of the alien race that actually created Earth and seeded it with what became human life. (It's a long story and not very interesting.) And for some reason it's falling out of orbit, too.

Anyhow, an intrepid disgraced ex-astronaut (who had a close encounter with the metal shavings on a mission years before), a plucky NASA ex-astronaut administrator (who was on the same mission but missed the encounter), and a wacky conspiracy theorist who seems to know more than all government scientists combined must team up to intervene in the AI battle and keep the moon from crashing into the earth as its orbit decays, although it causes a lot of trouble on the way down anyway.

There all are sorts of hijinks, including gravity doing things it doesn't do, the atmosphere doing things it doesn't do, NASA getting a space shuttle out of a museum and somehow making it spaceworthy in hours, and panicky people running and hiding and shooting at each other as things explode and crash and burn. Apparently the real astronaut serving as technical advisor would occasionally tell them "that's not really possible" but they would roll with it anyway because Movies. It's a total mess.

There was only one bright spot: Halle Berry actually tries her best to breathe life into a cardboard character speaking insipid dialog, She is working so hard I actually felt sorry for her, but she's really the only in the whole film who is acting.