Moonfall movie review
Learning to write by watching a not-amazing movie 🙂
Moonfall is far from my favourite movie. But it still, as all stories do, teaches me a few things about how to write a good story. When watching special effects, I practice for writing by imagining how I’d describe the scene. When the scenes are edited together well, as Moonfall is, it offers me clues on how to write beats, noticing how action and dialogue are paced and woven together. When the dialogue is terrible and the plot unemotional… well… what not to do.
Note to self: apparently movies get made by copying other way more successful movies? Wait, I could do that…
In any case, Moonfall’s emotionally flat plot sends me back to Interstellar to more closely study how it succeeded in its emotional payoff. And how it integrated a more scientifically plausible intelligence behind weird events.
Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoy Moonfall’s special effects.
A clip of my review (full review at https://cmgenton.ca/moonfall-movie-review):
Characters saying obvious things? Check. Cheesy alien conspiracy? Check. Little to no emotional connection? Check.
…unexpectedly, the quite decent filmography and special effects softened me. Many bigger-budget films don’t get their camera work right. And just like Interstellar’s realistic modelling of astronomical phenomena had my eyes shining, Moonfall’s visuals proved my favourite part: The moon spirals in toward the Earth, ripping up the Earth’s surface and dragging tidal waves across the landscape.
…Two former astronauts, Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) must find, rebuild, and launch a retired space shuttle under increasingly dangerous weather and gravity conditions. Certainly a novel natural disaster idea, but let’s not lose sight of its legacy: the volcano movies of, Volcano and Dante’s Peak; the asteroid movies of Armageddon and Deep Impact; the climate change movies like The Day After Tomorrow, etc, etc, etc. We love natural disasters with half-decent happy endings, 5/10 ratings and all.
However, Moonfall had more echoes to Interstellar than just the space premise, to the point of attempting a mirror: leaving children behind and solving a space-based mystery with external intelligence potentially behind it. But Moonfall’s answer to who’s doing this is far less profound than Interstellar. *Sigh.*
Lots more learning and movie reviews to come.