*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Wesley Stenzel’s review here.*
Have you ever wanted to die? Not really wanted it, not actively. But wanted an end to all this living. The unbearable exertion of getting out of bed in the morning. The humiliating ritual of putting on your stupid clothes. Reading horrible news day in and day out. Polar bear runs out of ice to stand on. Putin encircles Kyiv. The disgusting feeling of sunlight on your skin. Having life goals.
It is these little goals, our inconvenient attachments to the ones we love, and the guilt we’d feel in leaving them behind that keeps us punching in each day, executing our little tasks, and punching out for the oblivion of sleep. Finally, sleep, the only time that living does not coincide with labor. So, no, “wanting to die,” as the poet Anne Sexton put it, isn’t always about depression, loneliness, grief, any of those blue states. A lot of times it’s just an acknowledgment that we are all carrying so much, all the time, and we know that if we set it down, or if even a little falls off our back, just for a minute, it’ll be catastrophic for us, the ones we love, and everyone who’s come to depend on us. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, you sometimes think, if a giant meteor just smashed into the Earth and took us all out instantaneously? Like popping an Ambien, so smooth and quick, quicksilver, you don’t even realize you’ve crossed to other side.
Roland Emmerich is without contest one of the best directors of epic-scale disaster movies in the world. Perhaps the best. And he understands better than anyone the desire to throw your arms open and welcome the fiery blaze. The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, the much-underrated 2012. These are films without subtext. They aren’t tedious analogues for other pressing real-world issues, or clarion calls to gather the willpower and fight for humanity. They are literally about everyone on the planet blowing the fuck up. But if Emmerich understands one thing about what Freud called the death drive, he understands that it’s not really about dying.
Sure, his heroes and heroines always fight back against the dying of the light, and they always win. Nobody wants their total obliteration to come that easy. We have to at least pretend to want to save ourselves. But at their core, Emmerich’s films are not fantasies of rescue, they are fantasies of annihilation. In each of them, including his latest, the exquisite lunar apocalypse film Moonfall, large swaths of the planet are totally devastated before the heroes figure out how to stop the Bad Thing. Perhaps the point for some is the thrilling relief of absolute calamity being avoided in the final hour. But for the rest of us, the point is the carnage. The ecstatic, vicarious experience of total release—all your responsibilities, regrets, disappointments, and crushingly unfulfilled or unattainable hopes wiped away in the blink of an eye. At last: pureness, cleanness, rest.
Moonfall starts where you know it’s going to end up: in space. Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) are orbiting around Earth, fixing a satellite, when a huge black blob flies out of nowhere and attacks them. It severs the cord connecting a third astronaut to the ship that Jo has been knocked unconscious inside of. Only Brian sees the strange organism up close, before it flies off and lands on the moon. Twenty years later, the once inseparable pair (Brian used to refer to Jo as his “work wife”) have irrevocably parted. The ensuing investigation into the death of their coworker found Jo innocent (she’s gone on to be a second in command at NASA) and Brian liable for negligence (he’s a deadbeat dad, sort of, without a job, who still looks impeccably put together and rides a gorgeous motorcycle).
In the present day, a third character enters the fray, adding a perfect, irreverent yet sincere touch to Berry and Wilson’s hotshot action star semiseriousness. It’s K.C. Houseman, a neurotic fringe astronomer played by British actor John Bradley. The very amateur Houseman and some very highly trained scientists at NASA discover at about the same time that the moon has slipped its steady orbit around Earth, and will spiral ever closer until it crashes into us. The ETD is about three months. The ragtag team has to band together and save humanity—“Everything we know about the nature of the universe has just gone out the window,” and “there’s a hole in the Mare Crisium!” are just some of the exquisite, meathead zingers that Emmerich and writing partners Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen bandy about, to evoke the classic spirit of 100 million dollar blockbuster cheese. But before we can be saved, Emmerich takes pleasure in showing us all the delicious, delectable ways he’s thought up to exterminate us all.
Up until the final five to ten minutes of the film, every other scene in Moonfall depicts utter and complete, Book of Revelation scope apocalypticism. Lightning bolts blare, birds fall from the sky, the entire Pacific Ocean is whipped up into nightmarish labyrinth of cyclones. The Chrysler building is picked up and thrown all the way Colorado. In fact, nearly every character is eventually transported to Colorado for some reason. There is even a scene where Jo, having finally accepted defeat, says over an intercom to the scientists at the Vandenberg launch station: “You’ve done well. Go meet your families in Colorado.” I thought that maybe Emmerich had a home in Aspen that he wanted to sleep at while shooting, but no, all the Colorado scenes were shot on a stage in Montreal. Go figure! This is the sublime genius of Roland Emmerich. As it is with his spiritual sibling Michael Bay, and my personal go go action king McG, the real question for the audience is, why ask questions? In the midst of all this sensory pleasure, you want to ask questions?
Ultimately, the moon is revealed to be a huge machine that aliens, millennia ago, who were actually our ancestors (sure), built in order to make Earth habitable (“You’re telling me the moon is the biggest coverup in human history?”). They were being driven to extinction by smart nanotechnology they invented, which got smarter, and turned against them. Sure! Makes a lot more sense than Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a very similar, and phenomenally more dour, self serious take on this type of material. And unlike Interstellar, in Moonfall, all the exposition is neatly packed toward the end, in a mercifully brief sequence that makes just enough sense.
If you value your life, maybe you won’t like Moonfall. I, for one, had a blast. A woman seated behind me said “I’m so scared!” when we caught the first glimpse of the giant moon hurtling over the horizon. Another man clapped. For a couple hours, it was pure ecstasy at the Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance & IMAX. We all wanted to die.