This story focuses on a mysterious force that knocks the Moon from its orbit around Earth sending it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it. With mere weeks before impact, and the world on the brink of annihilation, NASA executive and former astronaut Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) is convinced she has the key to saving us all--but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and a conspiracy theorist Dr. K.C. Houseman (John Bradley) believe her. These unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love, only to find out that our Moon is not what we think it is.
Others to round out the cast are Michael Pena as Tom Lopez, Donald Sutherland as Holdenfield, Charlie Plummer as Sonny Harper, Brian's son, Kelly Yu as Michelle, Stephen Bogaert as Albert Hutchings, NASA director, Eme Ikwuakor as Gen. Doug Davidson, Chris Sandiford as Mosley and Jonathan Maxwell Silver as Johansen.
As with his other 'disaster' films, this was directed with grit and suspense by Roland Emmerich ("Franzmann" '79, "The Noah's Ark Principle" '84, "Making Contact" '85, "Universal Soldier" '92, "Independence Day" '96, "The Patriot" 2000, "The Day After Tomorrow" '04, "2012" '09, "White House Down" '13, "Independence Day: Resurgence" '16, "Midway" '19) plus others, a TV movie and two shorts. By his very resume, Emmerich is on very familiar ground with this film, considering all the mayhem as with prior films. Since this is something he knows a tremendous amount about, the ability to enable his actors to emit that certain degree of emotion wasn't really that difficult for him. He already had worked with Patrick Wilson when directing "Midway", and his character in this was fairly similar to that in "Midway". Still, he knows how to arouse his audiences in every film. This was written with an odd premise by Emmerich, Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen. If you look at the trailer of this, it looks like the story centers around something in outer space that caused some natural phenomenon to occur so as to throw our Moon off its orbit. However, as one watches this, one will see that its something more that is happening to cause the occurrence. As the plot indicates, there is a mysterious force that is a phenomenon, however, where did this force come from--what is its origins? This scripts attempts to explain this, but if the audience didn't get that explanation, then there's a scene with a bright light where an entity comes to one of the astronauts to simply tell him what's going on. Even after that explanation, it still makes one question that explanation even more. This story reminds me of the '08 film, "The Happening" directed by M. Night Shyamalan, in that the thing that was causing havoc in that film was so bizarre, that it was difficult to even understand the reasoning behind it. Instead of creating a totally bizarre premise to this, I believe it would be more palatable if the writers stuck with something a bit more believable. Going into the premise any more than I have would cause a spoiler alert, so if you are to see this, you'll see what I'm talking about. Emmerich has the lion's share of the writing experience here, but I'm not sure what happened. Bad day at the laptop?
If you are thinking about seeing this, I do recommend that you see it on the big screen for obvious reasons. It's even presented in an IMAX format as well. The visual effects predominantly created by Double Negative and Framestore were certainly mesmerizing and are deserving of the price of admission, but the writing simply needed more polish.
Out of 4 Stars: 2 Rated; PG-13 130mins.
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