Space disaster epic Moonfall asks: what would Elon do?

When they don’t make ’em like that any more, there is usually a reason. In previous years, director Roland Emmerich was a vastly successful prophet of doom. The occupying aliens of his Independence Day were vanquished — the Earth trashed in the process — only to be followed by climate disaster porn The Day After Tomorrow. But Hollywood has cooled on his school of blockbuster. With the actual end of world feeling ever closer, it seems less like a fun night out. Emmerich treated it as spectacle and a chance for last-gasp salvation. Now we huddle around Don’t Look Up, resigned to our fate. Hold the requiem. Emmerich is back with Moonfall, the kind of planet-flattening multiplex epic only he could make.

Oddly, the set-up is shared with nothing so much as Don’t Look Up — another grave cosmic threat, another outsider astronomer. The alarm is raised this time by KC (John Bradley), conspiracy theorist. (Emmerich clearly feels now is a great time to celebrate them.) But in place of a killer meteor, we face, yes, the Moon, tipping out of orbit and poised to destroy us, for reasons it would be wrong to reveal. Dialogue perfects the fine art of the ridiculous. Scientists talk of “mysterious self-replicating singularities”. As word gets out and civilisation collapses, TV news reports that “looting has become a favourite pastime of the United Kingdom”. Patrick Wilson plays an ex-astronaut in need of redemption. The role is in need of The Rock. High up in Nasa, Halle Berry tries not to overreact. (She often doesn’t react at all.)

The film paints Nasa less admiringly than Elon Musk’s name-dropped SpaceX. Helpful too are “our Chinese friends”. Emmerich has those in producers Huayi Brothers. Together, they stretch to a style we might call budget big-budget. It gets Emmerich to his happy place, destroying cityscapes with digital tsunamis. Berry and Wilson step up as last best hopes alongside sweet-centred KC. Meant to represent both conspiracy types and general fandom, he is thrilled to join the pros, summoning his inner action hero: “What would Elon do?”

Like Musk, Emmerich is waiting for space. Taking the fight to the Moon, the story goes full gaga Promethean, a Haribo sci-fi mash-up of The Matrix, Georges Méliès, Kubrick (poor Kubrick) and L Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. The result is bizarre and by many measures terrible. It is also almost certainly the exact film its director wanted to make. A hopeful comeback, it does not lack the wow factor.

★★★☆☆

In US and UK cinemas from February 4