Mulder never dreamed: Review of the sci-fi blockbuster "Moonfall"
When your closest companion is the main enemy: Roland Emmerich again tries to destroy the Earth, and again unsuccessfully.
“Every director makes the same film all his life” - a common phrase addressed to many directors will sound like a lazy generalization, but not for Roland Emmerich: it seems that he is even proud of such a status. "Independence Day", "2012", "The Day After Tomorrow" - again and again, the Earth on the verge is reluctantly saved by the hero. Going to the cinema to watch Moonfall is the fairest deal: if you're willing to watch the sweeping disaster movie again, you'll get exactly what you're looking for. If the chronicle of the death of civilization tires you, then you should not even try to start saying goodbye to the world.
So, the Moon is gradually descending from orbit and approaching the Earth in a spiral thread: gravity rebels, ebbs and flows wash away cities, and NASA makes a helpless gesture. The reason for the change of course of the faithful satellite is hidden somewhere in the craters of the Sea of \u200b\u200bCrisis, and one person knows for sure: the savior of the world in the future, but for now, retired astronaut Brian Harper (an unshaven Patrick Wilson in a leather jacket looks like an aging rock star). He was once tried for negligence and suspended from flying after a fatal incident. While Harper suffered from the injustices of the world and felt sorry for himself, his mission partner Jo Fowler (Hally Berry has not changed for the last 30 years) built a career in the space department. The rescue crew is missing a flight engineer - it will be the accidental genius KC Houseman (John Bradley) - another favorite type of Emmerich, dating back to Jeff Goldblum's hero in Independence Day.
"Moonfall", if you step back from the scale and eternal threats to planetary tranquility, a kind of ode to all the geeks and dreamers who will one day be noticed. These same fanatics and people, sometimes unrequitedly in love with their work, Emmerich glorifies picture after picture. Where corporations, governments and scowling scientists miss red flags, dreamers continue to believe in assumptions and invent new patterns of the universe.
But no one suggests taking seriously the proposed concept of the structure of the Moon: Emmerich is not Nolan, science is not needed here. But a cameo by David Duchovny at a meeting of the local MUFON would be very useful. Dr. Houseman (as the hero calls himself) is the direct heir to The Lone Gunmen from The X-Files, with his own philosophy and alternative ways of obtaining top-secret information. Despite the absurdity of the threat model itself (we won’t even try to retell it), the film precisely obeys the internal logic: each new attempt to ride gravity instead of primary bewilderment gradually begins to cause children's delight. This naivety and infallibility of believing in one's own conventionality casts off any skepticism - the screen is a big genre game, with many references to any pop-cultural references to the Lunar Conspiracy (there were also not without "The Shining" and "Space Odyssey").
Emmerich seems to be still living in 1995, which can only be envied. The same patriotic values and family problems, the same altruism and the same jokes: no pandemic, just a fantastic end of the world - so far-fetched that it is impossible to believe that one day the Earth may actually end. All the destruction looks, on the contrary, saving and become a kind of comfort zone: it's all make-believe, Armageddon does not threaten us.
Let the cataclysms look epic, sometimes very beautiful (for example, the ball of the Moon touching the snowy tops of the mountains) and monstrous, but still completely unrealistic. “The Fall of the Moon” is an absolutely “catastrophic” movie: someone can bring old school, and someone will certainly cough from the persistent smell of mothballs. But there's something about today that makes Emmerich's films endearingly nostalgic and makes you miss the good old end of the world.
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