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?
