The genre of the disaster epic has has been one that has benefitted from the improvements in special effects over recent times. CGI has allowed the visualisation of anything that can be imagined. This means the scale of disasters has grown. Director Roland Emmerich is the master of the overblown disaster epic. INDEPENDENCE DAY was a big, dumb disaster flick that was as big as they came and as dumb as they come, but just as fun as well. By 2012 the scale of the disasters had grown, but the silliness quotient had also increased. MOONFALL is so spectacularly silly it makes 2003's THE CORE (possibly the silliest disaster movie to date) look like a documentary.

The fact that the moon is megastructure (a planet-sized construction) is a science fiction conceit we can accept, and the stability of its orbit is based on its mass, so the stable orbit might well be affected by the shielding of its power source, but we are never going to accept that a space shuttle that has been sitting in a museum for more than a decade can be prepared for a launch in a couple of days. We certainly aren't going to accept that, having decided the whole mission is a no-go, switching everything off and evacuating the entire support staff, five people can rig the launch in 20 minutes. The hostile alien force supposedly attacks anything that has organic matter in the same place as advanced electronics, but it apparently only does this whenever it's needed to push the plot forward and doesn't bother when doing so would inhibit the plot. The space mission is the only thing that can save the planet, but it's left to a bunch of outliers and conspiracy theortists whilst nobody in government or the military are willing to assist? The tides are being hugely affected by the descending moon, but it's decided to launch the shuttle from a seaside location? And let's not forget a high-rankinig military commander holding his entire command chain hostage because his ex-wife never gave him any reason not to assume she couldn't save the day. The fact that she's his ex-wife might have given him some reason.

Quite apart from the sheer silliness of it all, the plot is hardly original, apparently being cobbled together from so many other films. The early alien attack on a space shuttle is straight from the destruction of the shuttle in GRAVITY combined with the space station sequence from THE FANTASTIC FOUR. The disgraced astronaut trying to impress his son is from ARMAGEDDON (itself hardly a paragon of logical plotting) and the sacrificial play of a major character at a critical moment is from every single space disaster movie that has gone before. Emmerich's own sequel INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE featured the whole two alien races in a historic war background that is recycled here. The earthbound family members' survival schtick closely resembles that of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW's climate disaster flick, as well as so many others. The encounter with the moon's artificial intelligence is so similar to the alien encounter at the end of THE ABYSS that James Cameron could sue. If there is a single original thought in this entire film's running time, we must have blinked and missed it.

Despite all this, the cast treat everything with admirable straight-facedness. Halle Berry has had her fair share of dealing with outrageous set-ups in the X-Men movies and handles herself with aplomb. John Bradley's character is just an enthusiastic puppy who's happy to be there, which is hardly a stretch from his role in GAME OF THRONES. Patrick Wilson also has experience of more comic endeavours from WATCHMEN and AQUAMAN and so helps to anchor things. Unfortunately, it would need an anchor a million times bigger to keep the film from floating off into reduced-gravity ridiculousness.

Even the special effects seem somewhat embarrassed to be there. The sight of the moon skimming only a short distance above the surface of the Earth, rising and setting within minutes is never even remotely believable. It just looks as silly as everything else.

If MOONFALL brings about any positive developments, let it be an end to the genre of ridiculous science fiction disaster flicks for ever.