Hacker Cinema
Moonfall
2022 · Film · 131 min
Directed by Roland Emmerich
A mysterious force knocks the moon from its orbit around Earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it.
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13 comments on Hacker News
They did something similar in Moonfall, which is a fun movie if you like campy sci fi like Independence Day and Armageddon. One of those movies I was glad to randomly check out on a flight.
True. There comes a point where the endless pursuit of realism starts getting in the way of a certain kind of narrative creativity. And in the process, we lose what should be the very essence of the word entertainment: to entertain.
The other day, I watched Emmerich’s latest film, Moonfall. A proper disaster movie, with all the necessary tropes. In short, that was real cinema, I had a great time. And yet, a large number of reviews on IMDb kept pointing out how “unrealistic” the film was. But if I’m watching an Emmerich movie, the very last thing I want is realism.
I think this is part of the current zeitgeist. The great inversion of real and virtual, as described by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, seems to make people believe that what happens on screen is reality, and then has to reflect their own conception of reality. The slightest deviation from that conception reminds them that it is only fake, and that they must, at all costs, "return to the matrix" in order to escape the real and the existential dread that follows.
There was. I think it was titled "Moonfall", or maybe "Another Earth". There is also "Oblivion" in which the Moon was partially destroyed. There are probably other ones, too, but I think "Moonfall" is the one to which you are referring. I might just give it a watch in a bit!
But yeah, it would not be a good thing, according to the movie at least.
Cloud Atlas (released 6 years after Moonfall was released as a book) also has a story with the earth being destroyed by mans attempt to harness the moon for energy (and also has a bad film adoption).
Moonfall is the first book I know of that used the concept, but it seems like humans have been fascinated with man or god(s) manipulating the moon for a very very long time, the oldest case I can think of is from the Quran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_of_the_Moon), so we've been fixated on the idea for a long time.
Maybe there are more cases and I will read about them in the comments here.
I watched an awful movie the other day where the Moon's orbit changes and they want to move it back, and I wondered the same thing. I guess the answer is no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonfall_(film)
(don't watch this film, it's not even so bad it's good)
Visualization of hyperloop between Florida and Hong Kong, and some of the hollow earth visuals, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39722705. Rest of the movie was less memorable :) The storyline of Apple TV's Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is more engaging. A few good visuals as well, but it doesn't have a movie budget. Moonfall has a good interior visualization of "hollow moon" spaceship at the end, but is otherwise forgettable. Mind-bending images of fictional "under space" and "inner space", respectively.
Just watched "MoonFall" [0] yesterday... Love AI-Doom-Porn-Movies like this...
Recommended watch.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834426/
Trash disaster movies have their place, 2012, Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Moonfall, etc. They are all entertaining in their own right, and are usually very self-aware of how stupid they are. Ben Affleck's commentary on Armageddon is gold. Though, I think that film was a higher tier than most of the list here, the Aerosmith song made for that film dominated the summer radio that year and the soundtrack flew off the shelves. I wish things like that still happened, you'll get a bump on Spotify but its cultural impact is much less.
In the movie Moonfall, there was a Google Home product placement.
The actor said "We have to go guys. Hey google, turn off the TV"
My Google Home activated and then turned off my TV. I'm not sure it was a good sales pitch for the product.
The approach Stranger Things (at least, in the first, best, season) uses to suspend disbelief is to invoke a sense of child-like wonder, AND terror. Our protagonists are, by and large, children, or emerging from childhood into the lived body-horror of being a teenager. We see the world (primarily) through their lens, a lens that magnifies AND simplifies things. They don't understand what's going on, they just _know_ things are happening. Their credibility is established on the basis of "are these things a kid could conceivably think/believe."
Contrast that to media like Moonfall, where the characters are supposed to understand what's happening AND convey that to the audience. That's a much bigger lift. Their credibility is established according to "does this correspond to things an engineer would plausibly say/believe," which not many films get entirely right.
Stranger Things also has one more screenwriting technique going for it - it shows, instead of telling. We are _shown_ 11 being submerged into a tank and transported to the Other, we aren't told that that's whats happening. We are _shown_ the terrors of a mother who's lost her child, we aren't told "oh she's so sad." Show, don't tell, is THE big rule of storytelling, and it's ignored because it's hard to achieve.
EDIT for grammar
it depends on how much you already know about computers...
I'm very very curious about the concept of 'suspend disbelief'.. which from my ongoing analysis, is all about how any fictional story is connected to reality.
I just watched the Moonfall movie and the most impactful thing for me is just how bad it comes out. While it's clear they've studied what's supposed to make a story work; and the dialog and exposition waste NO time, it fails to get me to suspend disbelief.
On the other hand, considering stranger things which does a better job, without being really good (it's just ok), still manages to get me to suspend disbelief much better than that awful movie.
Anybody have anything on suspend disbelief from a narrative (the technique of storytelling) standpoint?
I've realized by now that Tencent (or another chinese movie investment company) being a co-producer/investor in a "western" movie production is a pretty strong predictor of the movie being a medium-to-high budget mess with a very strange script.
'Moonfall' being the most recent example.
Hopefully the upcoming Moonfall movie can scratch that itch, allowing us to keep the real world JWST un-exploded.