"Independence Day", "The Day After Tomorrow": You quickly notice that Roland Emmerich's apocalypse films have reached a larger audience when you look around the sparsely filled hall at the best time on this cinema evening.

Maybe times have changed, maybe the actual catastrophes have gotten too close to still be receptive to the fascination of meter-high waves plowing through coastal landscapes, or the rain of city-sized particles from space falling on the hit the shaken earth.

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Perhaps "Moonfall", the latest film by Roland Emmerich, no longer has the rebellious charm of "Independence Day" or the skilful historical fluff of "Stargate".

Although he moves on similar terrain.

In "Moonfall," a nerd with an ostentatious PhD, slapped with the exaggeratedly descriptive name of KC Houseman (John Bradley-West), discovers before the experts in charge that the moon has deviated from its orbit and is heading towards earth.

NASA employee Jo Fowler (Halle Berry) quickly realizes that the men around her cannot be relied on to deal with the catastrophe, and at the latest after a mission has been sent to the moon with impressive speed and swallowed up there by a kind of multi-headed worm , she is pretty much on her own.

After all, there is still her former teammate Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), a defunct ex-astronaut who nobody wanted to believe when he made similar observations in space.

From the moment Fowler gains access to one of these secret NASA archives and is presented with images that confirm Harper's version, the first of three classic acts in this genre slowly comes to an end: in the beginning there is the calamity that befalls the Mankind breaks in, the second act describes the path to resistance, garnished with destruction and broken family ties, the third the final success and the view of the battlefield that has now calmed down again, including the commemoration of the dead.

The puzzling behavior of the moon is then quickly no longer a mystery, the satellite turns out to be a construct, an example of one of the "megastructures" that Houseman quickly suspected, as well as conspiracy theories ("Where do you think the Incas got the potatoes from? ’) repeatedly turn out to be astonishingly well thought out in this film, which in turn requires the viewer to be willing to say goodbye to elementary claims of logic and consistency.

You are part of the moon now, my son!

That doesn't speak against the film if you judge it by its genre.

However, it suffers from the fact that the longer it lasts and the more it sticks to convention (disregarded heroes finally get to prove themselves as heroes, members of dysfunctional families learn what really matters in life, and the like), the more it gets worse Lack of imagination revealed, sometimes even lack of love when it comes to the narrative strands of the subplots.

At some point, Harper and Fowler realize that they are a "good team" after all and leave it at that.

Looking back at the history of mankind (a history of catastrophes, what else?) in fast forward mode was also seen more inspired.

The fact that artificial intelligence behaves so strangely animalistic and at the same time by no means intelligent is at least a punch line.

But all in all one wishes for more of the charming madness of a dialogue at the very end of the film.

A person in space, who meets his mother with dementia and her cat, asks if he is dead now.

Her response: "We scanned your consciousness.

You are now part of the moon.”