Moonfall (2022) is a science-fiction disaster film about the two former astronauts and a conspiracy theorist who discover that the Moon is a megastructure — a Dyson sphere powered by a white dwarf — after it suddenly changes orbit.

The Moon is like an ark, responsible for creating a new home planet and seeding it with the same DNA as the ones who created it — humans which predate the creation of Earth. It was created in a last-ditch attempt to preserve the survival of the human race after a rogue swarm AI revolted and killed off all humans. However, the Moon is falling out of orbit because an AI swarm found the Moon and is trying to siphon energy away from it in an attempt to finally completely eradicate the human species.

I checked the Blu-ray out from the library, and on it there’s an extra where the director, Roland Emmerich, states that he was inspired by the book “Who Built the Moon?“. It proposed that the moon was not a natural object and Emmerich thought that would be a great idea for a movie and considered what would happen if it fell into Earth.

I found the story to be very cheesy and bad. I didn’t find even the story to be so bad that it was good — but the visuals made it enjoyable enough for me to watch.

There is a hint of a paradigm shift story, but it falls short. While the characters in the story are affected by the changes caused by the degradation of the Moon’s orbit, the story does not depict a change in perspective among society at large. Similarly, the main characters who save Earth come into information that would change society’s current understanding of human origin, but the film ends before this information causes a change in society.

Some of the changes as a result of the Moon’s degradation where interesting and believable to me (at least at first — the film exaggerates the effects to an unbelievable degree as it progresses). For example:

  • The tides changing
  • The creation of tidal waves
  • The atmosphere being stripped away
  • How it’s predicted that the Moon will break up as it approaches the Roche limit
  • How it would require less fuel to travel to the Moon as it approaches closer to Earth