We know for a fact that Roland Emmerich’s latest sci-fi disaster movie will be loud and dumb, as per the director’s oeuvre. But will it be fun? This newest Moonfall trailer suggests that maybe — just maybe — it might be, and if so, it’s all going to be because of John Bradley.
The Game of Thrones alum (he played Samwell Tarly) offers some pitch-perfect comedic timing and delivery in this trailer as the conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman, which may mean Moonfall will be more akin to Emmerich’s last fun global disaster movie, 1996’s Independence Day, as opposed to the slogs of 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla, Independence Day: Resurgence, et al. Not that all of Bradley’s bits are comedy gold — that would be far, far too much to ask of an Emmerich film — but it still means Moonfall is going to offer more than a million scenes of CG cities getting annihilated. See if you agree:
The trailer also shows how loud the film is going to be with endless shots of destruction that… uh… look like many other disaster movies we’ve seen, most of them made by Emmerich. The car ride through a crumbling environment comes straight out of 2012, while the weather catastrophes were seen in The Day After Tomorrow. The urban decimation was seen in both Independence Day movies. The premise is largely the same as Michael Bay’s Armageddon, while the black metal swarming aliens were definitely in one of the Transformers movies, although I absolutely refuse to look up which one it is.
Finally, this trailer also does a better job of showing how the movie is going to be as dumb as a box of moon rocks. So a conspiracy theorist — not, say, one of the tens of thousands of professional astronomers — is the only person who has realised the moon was dropping out of its orbit? Or that the space shuttle Houseman shares with rogue astronauts Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) and Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) manages to launch through a giant tsunami, when NASA aborts missions if the clouds are too big? Still, dumb fun and loud fun are both perfectly all right by me, and I will be pleased as punch if Moonfall manages to pull it off when it premieres on February 4.