Disaster movies follow the same formula

Plus, the special effects turn violent earthquakes or oversized aliens into the bad guy on the verge of destroying the world. However, there’s some unlikely hero who performs incredible feats of heroism that will make you miss him when he’s gone.

In Moonfall, yeah, the moon fell, but that’s not all. The disaster begins with a swarm of “alien tech” which totally throws a space mission out of control and that’s when the moon’s movement begins to change.

If it continues along its new course, the world will be destroyed. Now it’s up to two former astronauts and a conspiracy theorist to save the world.

The world, as seen through the eyes of director Roland Emmerich, is a normal day at the office.

Families making money and babies, people getting robbed and others eating Nsenene. Okay, nobody’s eating Nsenene.

Especially not with all the extreme flooding and earthquakes going on in this movie, grasshoppers would have to become water hoppers which means they would have to become dolphins.

Anyway, when the movie gets into the science behind this sci-fi somebody asks:

“You’re telling me that the moon is the biggest cover-up in human history?”

Enter Halle Berry, as Jo Fowler the de facto National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) boss lady.

She still looks like that sexy lady who walked out of the sea and into our lives with belt-like straps under her chest and across her hips as she looked super toned in James Bond’s Die Another Day.

Then there’s Patrick Wilson, who acts as Brian Harper, the washed-up astronaut who is the ‘best damn pilot in the galaxy’.

He is looking for redemption after being disgraced and also, in many scenes, seems to be looking for the rent too.

His landlord chases him all over the place, until he lands on the one place where there’s no rent: the moon.

KC Houseman (John Bradley) , the conspiracy theorist, brings some nerdy energy packed with comic relief to the picture.

He’s the guy who everyone thinks is a loser, except his mother. But she’s suffering from a neurodegenerative disease which makes her forget his name half the time, so I guess her opinion doesn’t really count.

The screenplay, characterisation and subplots, such as the one revolving around a troubled teenage son’s court case, glow in the moonlight of a falling moon.

When the movie shifts into planet-destroying overdrive, the “mounting moon terror” is brought home with computer-generated populations fleeing this way and that to become a spectacle to behold.

With such vivid imagery, a violent moon looms over the horizon, rising and falling as gravity goes crazy.

To best fracture the laws of physics, the film is awash with tidal waves submerging everything in sight, except your viewing pleasure. That will cheerfully stay intact for the 2 hours and 4 minutes of this $150 million movie.