Describing Roland Emmerich’s goofy movie Moonfall makes it sound better than it is

polygon.com:

It’s better for all of us if I spoil Roland Emmerich’s big silly action movie Moonfall here, at the start. This is not an act of spite. I really wanted to enjoy Moonfall, and I hope anyone watching it will find something worth enjoying in its 130-minute runtime. The trouble is, Moonfall barely delivers on the trailer’s promise of a throwback disaster movie from the one-time king of the genre. In its third act, it also falls to pieces when it pivots into bonkers science fiction spectacle. That pivot is the most interesting thing about Moonfall — an inexplicable choice that leads to unintentional hilarity and a world of missed opportunity. This film could have literally given us the Moon. Instead, it offers the world’s noisiest lullaby.

Here is what Moonfall pretends to be: a film about the Moon falling out of orbit, wreaking havoc on Earth’s ecology and spurring catastrophic destruction on a global scale. It’s the sort of thing that prompts a last-ditch mission for a ragtag crew of astronauts, who must rocket off to stop the Moon somehow.

Here is what Moonfall actually is. (Spoilers ahead. Seriously.) It’s a science fiction film about how the Moon is actually hollow, a vessel from our interstellar ancestors, which is under assault by an alien threat in the form of a sentient cloud of nanoparticles. The Moon and this artificial intelligence are the last remnants of an interstellar war, and Earth just happens to be in the crossfire.

Emmerich has made a name for himself as one of the last great disaster-movie kings. The genre that made him famous, via movies like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow,has fallen out of favor, as cinematic destruction has largely become the purview of superhero films. Moonfall is a