Moonfall (2022)

Moonfalls, Everyone Dies

As I’m an contrarian asshole, I often like to start things of with the bad stuff. So let’s begin. First off, Moonfall is full with the typical inaccuracies and Hollywood-bullshit you can find in every single movie, from the beginning of time to the end of time. Like, even in a zillion years, when only black holes remain, the society of intelligent blackhole-based AI filling the universe will still make something like movies, and it will still be filled with this shit. Ugh, I need a drink.

To expound a bit on this, I’ve counted at least seven separate moments where the movies should have ended prematurely, as the dumbasses involved got themselves killed. Luckily human technology in Moonfall runs on movie magic, so they made it out alive every time.

Also, you get the typical clichés, like big organizations like NASA being incredibly weird with trying to suppress information every idiot with a toy telescope could find, and of course the crazy conspiracy theorist is 100% right with fucking everything. The rest of course is also there, while not bad, just basic psychological manipulation to make you care for the characters, because othewise no-one would care about them, like here are the kids, they’re quirky, here are various dangers to try to kill them, please let them survive oh sweet Artemits! You get the drill.

A Kessler-Syndrome of Spoilers

And that’s already it I think with the negative stuff. A number of other things turned up, but the movie actually adressed a lot of them eventually, like a wink to the audience that Roland Emmerich actually had some help for his writers on the science (or comon sense) department. On the neutral side, I’ve learned that after my eye surgery last October, my eye sight still is not good enough to walk into a movie theater unaided. Luckily for all the people who are mad enough to care for me, I wasn’t actually stupid enough to walk into the theater alone. Weighted down by glasses, an eye-flap and a mask, plus my not exactly premium-class eyes, I had a friend help me out. Without her aid, I’d probably just stumbled and then rolled down the theater steps like the worst stupidest comedy skit. We’re talking Z-clas YouTuber skit here.

As it happened, I managed to prepare by avoiding all information about Moonfall like the plague, to enjoy (or not enjoy) the movie on its own merits. My friend did the same, and so all we knew when we sat down was two things: 1.) We were watching a disaster movie and 2.) The moon would fall on Earth.

And then the movie started and Roland Emmerich’s hand came out of the movie screen to bitch slap us, because Roland Emmerich is the greatest troll alive.

See, Moonfall is only tangentially related to the disaster movies of old. As we learn through the movie, the moon is actually a giant space station build to protect us from evil nanite swarms! Boy, did this come as a surprise for me. Instead of an incredibly silly disaster movie, Moonfall is an incredibly awesome science-fiction film! Nicely done, Roland!

The story of the movie is rather simple, after all secrets are uncovered: Billions of years ago our ancestors ruled the galaxy, but their AI turned evil. The moon is a surviving Anti-AI superweapon and revived our dead ancestors on Earth, recycling their ancient DNS to do so. Now the nanites are here and want to snuff out the last bastion of organic life, too!

Of course this is all bullshit, spitting into the face of every Earth-scientiest in person and in sequence, starting with Aaron Aabernathy, Astronomer. But despite it’s many flaws, it’s a really fun kind of bullshit and there are a lot of nicely done explosions to distract you from the stupider parts.

Self-Sacrifice and Smartphones

The dumb nerd who gets to tag along, despite being a stupid sack of shit and being cursed with so many health problems he’s like a poor man’s Mr. Burns, redeems himself by making a huge sacrifice to blow up the ancient AI nanite swarm, saving the moon. Though really, after nearly killing everyone by waving his smartphone around inside the spaceship despite knowing the evil aI is drawn to electronics, that was really the only way for his character to go without leaving the taste of bile in the viewers’ collective mouths.

On Earth, things turn out a lot stupider, since Earth can only draw on Earth-technology. Without space magic being available to dumb Earthlings, seeing people fleeing to Colorado as if the impact of the motherfucking moon would actually leave anything to “survive” in on the surface, was so bad it turned into black comedy. The minor plotpoint of the military trying to swat the moon away with nukes of course turns even more into farce when the military first plans to fire on the moon after it already entered the stratosphere (nice going idiots, was your plan to tickle the moon a bit before impact?) and then is stopped before wiping out mankind for real when the one smart general realizes that nukes don’t work well in a vacuum and pelting the moon after crashing into Earth’s atmosphere is a tiny bit too late to do anything useful. Though the evil AI would probably have praised this advanced method of self-termination.

While our moon-protagonists, with the help of the good moon AI, manage to save all of mankind, the dumb military guys all get buried alive when the giant moon-like structure scratches the mountains they’re in a bit, causing the ceiling of their bunker to cave in. The Earth-bound protagonists meanwhile manage to survive (well, most of them), only because the movie’s dramaturgy made them late for the party, so they only make it to the tunnels in front of the bunker before the movie is already over.

Oh and the nerd gets revived as an AI-ghost in the end. But don’t worry, the moon AI rewards him with immortality, he doesn’t turn evil.

Verdict

Nukes don’t work in space, morans. Also, the story resembles David Weber’s Mutineer’s Moon series a lot. Rather suspicious! Though to be fair, this could be he cause of Moonfall being roughly taped together tropes and clich+es: Our AI turning against us, our ancestors being really awesome and we’re actually post-apocalyptic versions of them, weird shit hiding in our moon, it’s all been done before. Even the extreme timescales of Moonfall (“billions of years”, oh my lord) do show up a couple times in the wondrous world of science fiction.

But the movie does have nice explosions, the absurd story is great fun to watch and everything I could complain about is in every single movie made in Hollywood, and always has been. Could Moonfall have been done better? Sure, but considering the average movie goes has the attention span of a may fly, that would have been a risky move. I can’t fault the publishers from staying conservative. At least they executed their idea fairly well and created a nice big-budget B-movie for us to enjoy.

Final verdict: 8 out of 12 moon-sized Death Stars. Have fun with your new galactic superweapon, Emperor Brian I. of Earth!

The House (2022)

How Not To Select Your Movie

Today I watched The House, a new very black comedy made completely in stop-motion, purely on accident. I saw the film randomly showing up when browsing Netflix, and the little icon of the movie showed a cute anthropomorphic stop-motion cat and as I really like cats, I immediately clicked on it, not expecting much beyond watching cartoon cats being cute while whatever garbage story the film-makers came up with rolled around in the background.

And then instead it was about the most ugly stop-motion people ever thought up in hell getting slowly crushed mentally and physically by an evil house. What?

Yeah, so this movie is a true black comedy, like only the British have the balls to do. The entire thing oozes Britishness out of every pore, and as a poor German, I often felt like I had to be born British to understand what was going on. The House is also the creepiest, most horrifying shit I’ve seen in a very long time. I’d call it a “horror comedy”, though probably not a lot of people would remember today that horror comedies were also once supposed to be scary, not just silly. Netflix calls The House “Satire” and this moniker is apt: It’s satire in the true sense of the word, so if you don’t like having constant nightmares for the next few days, you should probably not watch this.

Oh, and if you have an insect phobia, avoid this movie. You’ve been warned.

You’re still there? Well OK then, let’s continue.

Structure

The movie is actually three short stories, allegedly all happening “in the same house”, but that’s either a metaphor only British people can understand, or true only in the sense that interdimensional horrors can probably travel between universes. Each of the short vignettes is structured the same way: Some poor fool or group of fools are tricked into becoming landlords, and have their souls then slowly and gruesomely crushed by whatever happens next.

I guess the themes of The House could be flippantly summarized as “don’t be a landlord” and “if a dead mountain of bricks becomes more important than friends and family to you, hell awaits”. There are three variants of these themes playing out across the three short stories, and the eponymous house becomes the oppressive tool of hell to beat down on our unlucky wannabe landlords.

It also builds on different ideas of what house owners are like: The first story deals with a family being crushed by mortgages, the second deals with a rich idiot completely failing to see how he wastes and destroys his own life and the third deals with a frustrated house owner who has great plans for her shitty house, but lacks the money the other two idiot morons had in spades. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. From here on, there will be spoilers!

Thumbs

The first story plays in the 19^th century in what I’m blindly assuming is supposed to be our Earth. This world at least is populated with hideously monstrous thumb people (like, walking thumbs with faces ugly) and after a while you slowly realize that these things are supposed to represent humans. After the revulsion dies down a bit, you then concentrate back on the screen and learn that apparently, some rich fucker is building / has built (either the movie is not really clear on this, or I wasn’t really paying attention yet) a house in the middle of nowhere as some sort of fucked-up art statement. And now a family has bought the house and wants to move in.

After a long ordeal of suffering through the worst people Great Britain and mankind has to offer, the house has metaphorically eaten the parents and the house burns down to the ground, presumably out of sheer spite that there are still humans alive on this world. At this point I had realized I was watching real horror and not a Disney-movie, so I was really glad when the kids managed to survive. So OK, now they’ll starve to death in the icy semi-forested nightmare wasteland surrounding the house, but at least they won’t burn to death!

And that was the first story. It starts slow and creepy, and then the creepy just keeps ramping up until you stop laughing about how silly and ugly everyone looks and start to get scared.

Rats in the Belfry

The second story suddenly teleports you into a world where apparently, real humans and intelligent vermin are sharing the same world. (Either my attention span dropped a couple times again, or the movie keeps it intentionally vague if this is just basically Rat World, or if humans and intelligent rats are just sharing the same place).

But uh oh, we already had a full story about “humans” last time, so this time it’s all about the things you normally kill with poison if you find them in your house. We meet a stop-motion rat guy, some sort of semi-rich yuppie who wants to sell a house. We learn that he is really stressed about life in general, and there’s a failing relationship involved, with a partner we never get to see.

Getting someone to buy his fancy house runs into some problems along the way, like insects trying to claim the house for themselves and having to throw parties for other rich yuppies. At first, it’s literally him spraying poison everywhere like a lunatic, but as time goes on and he gets more stressed and desperate, things take on a turn for the more bizarre. Like insects masquerading as rats kind of bizarre. You know. Bizarre.

Eventually, rat boy here suffers a complete mental breakdown, a complete and utter destruction of his self. Symbolically, as his mind dies its final death, his smartphone dies too and a last attempt of his significant other to reach him fails. The phone call is left unanswered, and a completely normal, unintelligent rat rises from his hospital bed to go live together with a bunch of other vermin in the house he now not even owns. Very uplifting, if you’re an intelligent cockroach.

If You Hurt the Kitties, I will Murder You

So after two very dark, very intense stories, I was of course horrified when the third and last story started with cute kitties in yet another dimension, living their very British lives. This time, there are zero humans around, but the fucking house is of course still there, ready to destroy more lives.

At this moment, I had finally stopped doing anything besides watching the movie, and swore a blood oath to teleport behind the film makers like fucking Jason Vorhees, machete in hand, if anyone of those poor stop-motion cats was hurt in any way, shape or form. And considering how the other two stories ended, I was already preparing the goat sacrifice to gain the dark powers I needed to pull this off.

Without spoiling too much, after watching humans and rats fucking things up, we finally get catharsis, as the last wannabe-landlord is not only a cute kitten with the cutest British lady voice, but also not as braindead stupid as the other idiots, who fed their lives and families to Mammon without a second thought. She has scruples, and her friends get to keep on being her tenants, despite only being able to pay in fish and crystals instead of money.

It does get hairy of course, and as we already know the house, this third story creates an astonishingly nightmarish and oppressive feel, which only works because we got to see the other two stories first. We know things are fucked, even if the cats are just living seemingly peaceful lives as stereotypical British people. If this story was put first or second in the order, the entire movie would collapse under its own metaphorical weight like a black hole of stupid. Luckily, the film-makers also had a working brain and so you get to fret around, hoping the cat lady will escape her pre-ordained gruesome fate.

Also luckily our catty friend manages to not alienate her friends away and eventually defeats the evil house by realizing a house is just a dumb dead thing made of bricks. Defeated, the house is now a boat! But I’m still watching you, house. I’ve not forgotten. No, I have not.

Anyway, our cat lady escapes with the help of her friends. The End.

If I read this metaphor right she still owns a house now, but stopped being a landlord or something. The literal level we get to see, well, literally, is a bit too weird to fully explain in text, you will have to go and watch for yourself, I fear.

I think it’s a reference to Global Warming? Or the secret wish of every German to finally sink those damn islands? Who knows. The cats are safe, and that’s literally all I cared about in the end.

Verdict

This movie was a bit of a surprise, which I guess should be expected if you base your viewing choices on stuff like how cute you think the front cover of the DVD case looks or whatever. Still, putting the heroine of the third of three stories up, front and center was certainly a thing Netflix did.

To be honest, probably more people like cats then rats or weird thumb humans, so from a marketing perspective, it makes perfect sense. And well, it worked in my case! I wouldn’t have tried this movie otherwise. Putting the cutest animals last is a masterful stroke of psychological manipulation, boosted by making the last batch of characters also the most likable of the bunch.

Overall, the movie works. It tramples on you and keeps screaming about the futility of man into your eyes and ears until the bitter end, where you finally get to have some slight relief: It is possible, you learn, to escape the horror of capitalism, if you’re willing to leave that dumb pile of bricks behind and search for a real home instead. A lesson for the ages, but sadly one probably wasted on the kind of people who spend all their time buying and selling houses, I think.

Though if you are, indeed, a very stressed out landlady, maybe watching this movie will make you realize how shitty your life is and how much better you could do if you aren’t constantly dealing with tenants, house repairs, the housing market, and rich guys trying to make you burn your own children. A very German lesson, now that I think about it.

It’s nice to see at least some people still remember what satire is supposed to be and sadly, even here in Germany, things have gotten bad enough watching this movie really, really hurts you. The only way to get through this without feeling visceral pain is to either be a soulless monstrosity, like a landlord, or to have enough billions of buckazoids your soul was not drained, but never there in the first place.

Final verdict: 13 out of 13 hanged landlords. Viva la revolución!

Edit: Oh, Cat-harsis. I get it now. Very funny, you fuckers.