Last night I watched Moonfall on Netflix.
At first I thought it was Moondust, a novel I once had on the shelf, alas unread, but Moonfall's based on another book.
The film is basically about the moon falling nearer to Earth and life as we know will end.
It starts well enough, out in space, on a Space Shuttle.
It began to lose ground with me when humour was forced into an otherwise serious plot, with the introduction of a character called Dr. Houseman. He's a kind of Good Will Hunting type janitor-genius who avidly blogs about his particular geekery, the idea that the moon is a Megastructure.
Megastructures are the kind of thing I really enjoyed reading about in the 1970's, along with Nazca Lines and the Chariots of the Gods. Wacky stuff like that was the currency of the decade back then.
I was, though, surprised to see it in a film in 2022.
But it wasn't Megastructures that became the issue with Moonfall. It was the unconvincing Houseman character, a sort of super brainy buffoon at odds with the alpha males and females of NASA's astronauts, together with the thick dollops of cheddar ladled onto the dialogue by its director.
I expected some corn, after all it is a Roland Emmerich film, he of Independence Day, which I enjoyed hugely, but Moonfall's dialogue is so weak that the schmaltz just drowns it.
When the male lead grabs his errant son and loudly proclaims that he wants to give him a world where it can all be better I had to turn it off.
Moonfall went on to become on of the biggest cinematic flops of all time losing millions and millions of dollars.
Somewhere the sci-fi got lost in the lunar cheese.
Have you seen it readers?
No, Woodsy, I didn't bother to see it.
ReplyDeleteThe reviews, like yours, were SO bad, I gave it a miss.
A shame really, not a bad idea Mish!
DeleteFortunately not. Thank you for the warning
ReplyDeleteI only saw half the film Khus so its possible the second half is much better! Sadly I will never find out!
DeleteSorry to hear you consider the Nazca Lines and Chariots of the Gods as "wacky stuff" - I still think there's a great deal to be said for the "ancient astronauts" theory. Today's "scientists" don't know nearly as much as they claim, and they have never successfully debunked any of the main "AA" arguments, imho. Hey, we can't even seem to get a man on the moon now! If you objectively re-read the UFO literature of the 1950s/1960s, there is overwhelming evidence that we've been visited.
ReplyDeleteAnd you could not pay me to watch any Sci-Fi movie made in Hollywood in the last twenty years. Its all loud, virtue-signalling CGI garbage. The last one I got tricked into seeing, years ago, was Pacific Rim. Ouch!
I suppose I'm echoing what other people might think Zigg when I say 'Wacky'. Its all quite normal for me as I was steeped in all things esoteric when I was a teenager in the Seventies. I'm pretty certain that even in those long-haired times my wider family thought I was a bit weird! I remember reading Fire from Heaven, a paperback about spontaneous combustion, in one night and missing Sixth Form college the next day! I managed to find a copy again at a car boot sale decades later, my own original copy having spontaneously ....
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