By William Smith – Staff Reporter

“Moonfall” was released on February 4 and was directed by Roland Emmerich. It stars John Bradley as K. C. Houseman, Patrick Wilson as Brian Harper, Kelly Yu as Michelle, Halle Berry as Jocinda, Charlie Plummer as Sonny Harper, and Michael Pena as Tom Lopez. 

“Moonfall” is a movie about the moon on a crash course towards earth. When the movie starts, we meet Brian Harper and Jocinda, NASA astronauts who are doing repairs on a satellite in orbit, when all of a sudden a metallic being comes around and kills one the astronauts and sends Brian Harper and Jocinda Hurtling back to Earth. When he comes back to earth NASA fires him because they believe that it was a solar flare from the sun. Ten years later we met K. C. Houseman, a conspiracy theorist who discovers the moon is out of orbit and is headed towards earth. K. C. tries to meet with people from NASA but they won’t listen, but then he sees a newspaper article that leads him to Brian Harper who is supposed to be teaching kids about space. When K. C. tries to talk to Brian about it, Brian shrugs it off as the ramblings of a crazy person. In the next scene we see Jocinda at NASA when she looks at her phone when a notification goes off that the moon is out of orbit and is headed towards earth. K. C. is holding a meeting at a hotel about the moon being a mega structure (a fake planet that is filled with metal and alien tech) when Brian shows up to tell K. C. that he was wrong and tries to help him, but when that happens a huge wave comes crashing through because the moon is messing with the tides.

Meanwhile, NASA is sending probes to check out the moon to see what’s wrong with it but what happens is the metallic being comes out from the pit they were probing to kill the three astronauts who were probing the pit. When the NASA control team sees this  the director quits and gives his job to Jocinda. Jocinda decides to go down the NASA rabbit hole to see its dark past. It was on the Apollo mission when they discovered that earth is hollow and discovered the metallic being so in order to counteract it they constructed an emp, but because of budget cuts the emp was put away. Jocinda decides to contact Brian because he was able to land a spacecraft with no power whatsoever (it’s important because it was found out that metallic beings only attack beings inside electrical machines) and when they meet K. C. is with them. They decide to come up with a plan of action to reach the moon and kill the creature or whatever it may be.

“Moonfall” had many strong points. It had amazing visuals that captivated the eyes. There were some moments that left viewers wondering how they had the budget to make that scene. Another strength of the movie was it managed to pull off a B-story as well as the main story. They did well in that area but they could have done better because there was just one bad thing happening after another and it never gave any breathing room in between.

The movie did have some weaknesses, however. It was very plot-heavy and very hard to follow the story because there was so much going on. Second, the fact that the whole world believed a known conspiracy theorist and worried so many people is crazy because it’s hard to believe that people would trust a source of information like that. Third, this movie probably would have done better as a TV show because there was so much lore and loose ends that it could have done and it also wouldn’t have made the plot feel as rushed as it is. 

Rating 3.5 out of 5 stars