*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Ryan Coleman’s review here.*
There’s a trend in modern movie discourse to write off certain smashy action blockbusters as “stupid.” Even people who like series like The Fast and the Furious and Transformers feel the need to concede that they’re guilty pleasures, or dumb exercises in empty spectacle. Strangely, though, most moviegoers don’t have the same embarrassment when they say they like Marvel movies or Star Wars, despite the fact that on paper, these movies’ premises are virtually indistinguishable from those aforementioned series. 90 percent of contemporary blockbusters follow strikingly similar structures: a loose hero’s journey where a ragtag team comes together to save the world by stealing a vaguely-powerful weapon or stopping the bad guys from shooting a big blue beam into the sky. So what’s the difference between Fast and Furious and Avengers? All of these movies are equally silly, so why do only some of them get branded as stupid? If the premises aren’t that distinct, then the distinction must come from the execution, not the idea.
The key delineation between these two schools of contemporary action cinema is that one set is earnest, and the other is self-aware. Movies that outwardly acknowledge their absurdity are somehow less shameful to enjoy than those that play everything with a straight face. Most Marvel movies are almost aggressively self-aware: if Iron Man and Star-Lord aren’t cracking jokes about how insane their situation is, then you can bet that an audience-surrogate side character played by Awkwafina or Kat Dennings will say something to the effect of “this is crazy!” Star Wars pulls off a slightly subtler self-awareness by casting actors like Harrison Ford and Oscar Isaac who seem a little too cool for the Star Warsiness of it all, telling skeptical audiences that they needn’t take the movies too seriously because even the stars understand that it’s a bit goofy. Self-aware movies defend themselves by explicitly or implicitly verbalizing the audience’s objections to the silliness at hand—if a character says “it’s crazy that we’re doing this,” then the cynics in the cinema can’t complain about how crazy it is. It simultaneously makes them easier to digest and deflates their overall power.
Earnest blockbusters are much more difficult to come by these days, perhaps because they’re so much easier to mock—but I think they’re purer, more admirable pieces of entertainment than their self-aware counterparts. Movies like Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Justin Lin’s F9 are preposterously silly and full of flaws, but they’re movies that believe in themselves. They allow their characters to have emotions as big as their set pieces without making fun of them, and are unafraid to take massive narrative and thematic swings.
Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall is so earnest that it feels like a relic from a bygone era—something that would naturally follow a couple years after the director’s Independence Day in the mid-90s rather than a film released four presidents after Bill Clinton. It’s a movie about the moon breaking out of orbit and, you guessed it, falling toward the Earth in troublingly large pieces. A washed-up astronaut (Patrick Wilson), his former work wife (Halle Berry), and a message board conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) single-handedly launch a decommissioned space shuttle into the sky and eventually end up inside the moon. The movie presents all of these developments with total confidence, trusting that its audience will endure lines like “save the moon, save Earth” without losing faith.
The film’s character arcs are simple but mostly effective: Wilson’s Brian redefines his sense of purpose by leading humanity into its next chapter, while Bradley’s KC overcomes humiliation by making a moving sacrifice that forever fuses him with his passion. Meanwhile, Brian’s son (cleverly named “Sonny,” played by Charlie Plummer) learns to be a man by burying the hatchet with his stepfather (Michael Peña) and defending his family. Berry’s Jocinda gets the short end of the stick, essentially just girlbossing into space and hanging out until the guys she hired fix everything. All of these characters are funny, but not in a way that feels calculated or even intentional—instead, the humor stems from the ultra-seriousness of lines like “If the moon really is what you think it is, suit up.” It’s impossible to know if the writers or actors know how absurd this kind of dialogue is, but it’s a true joy to behold because it’s not embarrassed to swing for the fences.
Perhaps Moonfall’s most pleasant surprise is the sheer scale of its third act ambitions. In a series of preposterous sequences that combines bonkers exposition with gorgeous CGI, our characters learn about humanity’s cosmic origins and are offered a glimmer of hope for a utopian society. It’s here that the film reveals the extent of its thematic concerns. It’s surprisingly technophobic and has a complex but ultimately optimistic view of human nature, insisting that people might be capable of great evil, but possess a greater capacity for unity and progress nonetheless. And beneath the veneer of disaster movie military propagandizing, it actually doesn’t seem to trust the government very much.
Bizarrely, the action is the one element that doesn’t quite work. The setpieces squander a number of inventive concepts. There are a couple of brilliantly-conceived chase sequences involving warped gravity that feel like they’re only thirty seconds long when they should be ten times that length, and an intriguingly-designed kaleidoscopic cloud of AI nanobots fails to do anything dynamic besides menacingly float around.
But Emmerich’s unabashedly earnest approach to maximalist filmmaking feels shockingly refreshing in a sea of endless winks and self-aware asides. Moonfall understands that big movies don’t have to make fun of themselves to be fun, and more action filmmakers ought to follow its example.