roland emmerich

Moonfall (2022)

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In Moonfall, the moon is a hollow “megastructure” that very nearly crash-lands into Earth (getting close enough to scrape a few mountain tops) before course-correcting back to its proper orbit.  It is the exact same moon-crash disaster epic that director Roland Emmerich would have made in 1998 had the script crossed his desk then, except with fewer movie stars filling out the ensemble cast; only Halle Berry & a brief Donald Sutherland cameo pass the Would Emmerich Have Cast Them in the 1990s? test.  As a genre, the over-the-top, over-budgeted CGI spectacle has continued past the 90s in the respective movie industries of India, China, and Korea, but Emmerich’s distinctly retro charms only recall pictures from its Hollywood heyday: Armageddon, Mission to Mars, The Matrix, Contact, Deep Impact and, of course, Emmerich’s own Independence Day.  Everything from the film’s shameless Lexus product placement to its astronaut hero’s anxieties over being an absent father are so distinctly 90s that it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’ve already seen half of it before on TBS, intercut with hours of commercial breaks and an unplanned afternoon nap.

Well, maybe not everything here would’ve made its way into the 90s version of Moonfall.  Game of Thrones‘s John Bradley is assigned the thankless task of modernizing the falling-moon disaster premise with some 2020s internet lingo.  Bradley plays a conspiracy theorist blogger & YouTuber, a self-proclaimed “megastructurist”.  We are told he is very smart, as he is the first civilian to deduce that the moon is crashing into Earth and that it is not a natural moon at all, but rather an alien-made megastructure.  Since he’s a cat-meme nerd who asks the question “What would Elon do?” for self-motivation, however, I retain that he is, in fact, very dumb.  Halle Berry & Patrick Wilson’s heroic NASA defectors agree with that assessment, and continue to poke fun at his absurd, idiotic conspiracy theories about moon lasers & the moon’s hollow core long after he’s been proven correct.  They’re right to do so.  Moonfall‘s premise is absurd & idiotic, and it was only written to set up the CGI spectacle of the film’s final act (where, spoilers, the mismatched trio stop the moon from falling). Thankfully, in the process it also sets up some beautifully asinine dialogue exchanges about the peculiar nature of our megastructure moon, a few of which I will transcribe below for your reading pleasure:

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

“I told you! The moon was built by aliens.”

“You are the key to our moon’s knowledge.”

“We scanned your consciousness; you’re part of the moon now.”

Between Moonfall & Ambulance, it’s been a big year for vintage vulgar auteurs pretending it’s still the 1990s.  Michael Bay at least updated his schtick with modern drone camera tech; Emmerich simply stuck to his basics while committing to the biggest goofball premise he could find.  Sometimes, that nostalgia for Hollywood’s knucklehead disaster-epic past feels like a deliberate intent of the script, which laments several times that all of NASA’s moon shuttles are collecting dust in museums instead of standing by to heroically save the day (in case, you know, the moon decides to fall).  It’s much more likely, though, that Moonfall is just the Emmerich production machine on autopilot. Any byproduct nostalgia is an incidental result of how that rusty content mill differs from the MCU and Fast & Furious empires that have taken its place in the past couple decades.  Neither Emmerich nor Bay put in their career-best work this year, but there is still something reassuring about watching them do their usual thing in a post-superhero Hollywood.  All we need now is for Jerry Bruckheimer to produce a big-budget swashbuckler about the recovery of Atlantis to complete the cycle.

-Brandon Ledet

The Photocopied Mayhem of Monster Island Entertainment

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I’ve been long-overdue for a nostalgia-check rewatch of the 1998 Godzilla film, directed by notorious Hollywood dingus Roland Emmerich.  Since it was the first fully American Godzilla production, the hype leading up to that film’s release was immense and—a child at the time—I bought into all of it: the tie-in Saturday morning cartoon, the rap-rock soundtrack CD, the Taco Bell-exclusive merchandise, all of it.  The film was a critical flop and a commercial disappointment, but I was young enough (and offline enough) to remain blissfully unaware of its reputation as the biggest embarrassment to-date in Godzilla’s 30+ film franchise.  That tainted rep has been difficult to ignore in recent years, though, as other 90s Kid™ nostalgia traps like Mortal Kombat, Space Jam, and Spice World have enjoyed retroactive critical appraisal from goofball Millennials (myself included, on all three counts) while Godzilla ’98 has maintained its cultural standing as one of the worst blockbuster misfires of all time.  I had to revisit the film to see for myself whether it was the monstrously entertaining creature feature I remembered watching as a kid or the putrid, bloated travesty everyone else reports it to be.  As per usual, the truth is that it falls somewhere between those two extremes.

The 1998 Godzilla isn’t especially horrendous nor especially great by any particular metric; it’s passably entertaining for a goofball blockbuster spectacle marketed almost exclusively to children.  I honestly believe that the film would’ve been remembered fondly if it had just been a dinosaurs-attacking-NYC movie instead of dragging Godzilla’s name into its CGI buffoonery, since the creature’s legendary run with Toho set an expectation it was never going to meet.  A $100mil Roland Emmerich production was never going to sincerely grapple with the post-nuclear emotional devastation of the original 1954 Godzilla, nor was it ever going to indulge in the wildly imaginative free-for-all of weirdo outliers like 1971’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah.  It basically just uses the Godzilla name as an excuse to stage one-off, city-crushing gags with a square-jawed T-Rex that has practically nothing to do with the creature’s post-War Japanese origins.  I can see how that half-hearted appropriation of the Godzilla legacy was insulting to adult fans of the original Toho series, but I can also personally report that it did not matter at all to the dipshit 12-year-olds the movie was marketed to, at least not while we enjoyed watching a CGI NYC get smashed up real good by a giant dino.  In retrospect, both sides of that level-headed critical divide were likely exaggerated responses to what the film could and did deliver.

The reason I’m suggesting that Godzilla ’98 might’ve fared better as a dino invasion movie is because that’s where it’s heart clearly was anyway.  It borrows practically all its ideas, images, and musical cues from the first two Jurassic Park movies, announcing its intention to outdo the iconic Spielberg series in an early teaser ad that showed Godzilla’s gigantic foot crushing the museum-residing skeleton of a T-Rex.  It recreates the first Jurassic Park‘s raptors-in-the-kitchen sequence, its street race T-Rex chase, and even its gender-reveal pregnancy twist – all ported over to the city-invasion context of The Lost World.  Tri-Star Pictures could’ve saved a lot of money and a lot of critical grief if it had just set gigantic dinosaurs loose in modern Manhattan instead of bothering to license the Godzilla name.  The film is basically an overly expensive mockbuster version of what Jurassic Park had already accomplished, except with a novelty urban setting that adds a fun new bubblegum flavor to the mayhem (like the gag where the central group of heroic New Yorkers drive a Yellow Taxi cab directly out of Godzilla’s mouth onto the Brooklyn Bridge).  What’s amusing about Godzilla‘s function as a shameless Jurassic Park knockoff is that it was a big enough production to inspire its own parasitic mockbusters – copies of a copy.

Enter notorious schlockteur Charles Band, whose long-running exploitation enterprise Full Moon Features was no stranger to producing straight-to-VHS, proto-Asylum mockbusters of legitimate Hollywood films.  Smelling chum in the water as soon as Godzilla‘s production was announced in the mid-90s, Full Moon rushed to establish a kaiju-themed sub-label called Monster Island Pictures, offering kid-friendly, straight-to-VHS alternatives to the incoming Roland Emmerich behemoth.  As the major-studio Godzilla film failed to produce its own sequels, Full Moon’s Monster Island Entertainment also failed to sustain itself long-term – throwing in the towel after just two films.  It’s safe to say that neither 1996’s Zarkorr! The Invader nor 1998’s Kraa! The Sea Monster had much of an impact of the pop culture landscape at large, only registering with the naive, kaiju-hungry children who happened to rent them from video stores at the height of Godzilla fever.  In retrospect, however, they hold a kind of vintage kitsch appeal as lost 90s Kids™ relics.  They’re the exact kind of real-deal VHS schlock ephemera that now gets ironically spoofed in retro throwbacks like PG: Psycho Goreman but rarely get revisited in earnest.  I couldn’t help but fall further down that Godzilla mockbuster rabbit hole myself, though, especially since they’re also the exact kind of cultural runoff that’s readily streaming for free on Tubi.

Although Kraa! The Sea Monster was the Monster Island Entertainment title released the same year as Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla, Zarkorr! The Invader is the one that feels like its direct knockoff.  The titular Zarkorr is a gigantic reptile with magical fire breath and metal-on-metal roars, which makes him pretty indistinct as a Godzilla alternative.  All the film’s city-crushing monster action is fairly limp as a result, despite the inherent cuteness of a rubber-suit dragon creature stomping down a dinky miniature of Newark, NJ.  Thankfully, the film does indulge in plenty of goofy Charles Bandian bullshit outside of those tedious monster attacks, even if it’s not quite enough to make up for the giant-reptile mediocrity.  Its on-the-ground humans plot involves a gone-postal mailman who’s selected by an invading alien race for a kaiju-themed experiment specifically because he’s the most Average man alive.  As a test of humanity’s collective wit & resolve, its most unremarkable specimen is alone tasked with the destruction of the dragonlike Zarkorr, who’s stomping his way to the man’s shitty New Jersey apartment for an inevitable showdown.  The Charles Band-specific novelty of that set-up is in the presentation of the aliens’ message, which is delivered by a doll-sized Valley Girl teenager on a set with jumbo-scaled prop kitchenware.  That familiar Full Moon obsession with dolls & miniatures doesn’t do much to jazz up Zarkorr’s mediocre kaiju mayhem, but it’s at least a momentary distraction from the tedium.

Monster Island Entertainment didn’t really go off the rails with its Godzilla mockbusters until 1998’s Kraa! The Sea Monster, which feels more like a pilot for a Power Rangers-style action series than it does a proper kaiju film.  Its plotting is deliciously, deliriously inane.  A space warmonger named Lord Doom (costumed to look like Marvel Comics’ Doctor Doom, naturally) sends the kaiju-scale fish monster “Kraa The Warbeast” to Earth to steal the planet’s warmth so his own homeworld doesn’t freeze into oblivion.  Earth’s only protectors are a small crew of Power Rangers-style space cops who lurk just outside of orbit but cannot reach the planet’s surface due to a malfunctioning spaceship.  They have no choice but to enlist on-the-ground help from a wisecracking crab creature with an obnoxious Italian accent, their only nearby agent who can pitch in to stop Kraa before it’s too late.  The kid-friendly punchlines and visual gags are just as eyeroll-worthy in Kraa! as they are in Zarkorr!, but the fanged-fish kaiju design and deranged Full Moonian plotting go much further in distinguishing it as a stand-alone novelty.  If it weren’t for its rushed-to-market 1998 release date and its Monster Island Entertainment production title, you might not even recognize it as a Godzilla mockbuster; it’s its own uniquely goofy thing, which is more than you can say about Emmerich’s extensively market-tested Jurassic Park knockoff.

The most sublime moment in this entire trio of photocopied kaiju novelties can, of course, be found in Kraa! The Sea Monster.  During the first monster attack, Kraa takes the time to destroy a building that prominently features a billboard advertisement for the 1998 Godzilla, starting with a close-up shot of the better-funded film’s iconic logo before it’s ripped to shreds by the rubber-suited fish monster.  In another meta-referential visual gag, Kraa! The Sea Monster spotlights a theatre marquee advertising a screening of Zarkorr! The Invader.  The best any of these three films could hope to accomplish is as a memorably goofy byproduct of corporate synergy.  I had fun revisiting a few individual gags in the 1998 Godzilla film, but none are as fun to think about or revisit as the film’s extratextual tie-in marketing, where Godzilla squares off against the likes of Puff Daddy, Charles Barkley, or the Taco Bell chihuahua to cash in on the momentary kaiju craze it stirred up in American pop culture.  As a shameless exploitation filmmaker of the lowest order, Charles Band inherently understood the novelty value of that kind of pop culture cross-over synergy, something his Monster Island Entertainment sub-label pushed to its goofiest extreme with Kraa! The Sea Monster.  None of these movies are essential viewing, but Kraa! is the one that’s the most honest & playful with its kaiju mockbuster appeal.  To match those dubious creative heights, Godzilla ’98 would’ve had to fully commit to a Jurassic Central Park premise it was too timid to openly indulge.

-Brandon Ledet

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

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Several years ago when Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake was first announced, I asked my neighbor and fellow horror fan Drew if he thought it would be worth seeing. In his trademark bombast, he declared that there was no point; the original Halloween had spawned so many imitators and copycats over the ensuing decade that the movie had essentially been remade dozens of times.

I couldn’t help but think about the autumn afternoon that conversation took place while sitting in the theatre watching Roland Emmerich’s latest cinematic outing, Independence Day: Resurgence last week. Why should we revisit the world of Independence Day when there have been so many imitations, parodies, and virtual remakes of that movie in the twenty intervening years between the original and this too-late sequel? Especially given that many of the attempts to recapture ID4’s success were made by that film’s director? After early career success with cult film Universal Soldier and the big-budget sci-fi flick Stargate (which I rather like, although I understand and accept that I’m in the minority on this one), Emmerich hit the film world with comparable force to one of the ID4’s flying saucer beams. The 1996 film was the highest grossing movie of the year, with a box office take of $817.4 million (for comparison, Twister was the second highest grossing film of 1996, raking in $494.4 million, about 60% of ID4’s total), and led Time to declare that science fiction was back in the mainstream. Comparative quality aside, Independence Day was essentially the Star Wars of the nineties: a surprise blockbuster success that catapulted almost everyone involved into another level of Hollywood starpower.

There are those who argue that Independence Day is a dumb movie, including most internet reviewers like (my personal hero) Lindsay Ellis, although even the hardest-hearted nitpicker can admit that there’s nothing wrong with loving a dumb movie. I have an unabashed fondness for ID4 even after all the times that I’ve seen it, and I can’t even find it in my heart to consider it a dumb movie, for all of its flaws. The characterization is generic and bland; as a result, most of the audience investment in the film rides on the charisma of its leads, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, and (especially) Will Smith, even more than the show-stopping effects work that turns DC, LA, and NYC into smoldering ruins. The film is unabashedly patriotic and jingoistic, but in a largely positive way; it’s not pro-America to the extent that non-Americans are portrayed as chaotic evil monsters, as in films in the vein of Emmerich’s later film The Patriot. What I love most about ID4 is that the stakes feel real and tangible, because the world of Independence Day is, for all intents and purposes, our world.

Resurgence’s biggest flaw lies in how it fails to understand the simple appeal of that reality. Because all the reviews that you’ve seen talking about how Resurgence is an awful piece of shit aren’t really accurate: Resurgence is a perfectly serviceable modern science fiction film. That’s faint praise and I know it, but it’s the truth. Resurgence is not a good movie or a bad movie, it’s just a moderate, middle of the road, mediocre film. It’s just as “dumb” as ID4 but without the charm. It’s basically a Syfy Channel original but with actors who can recite dialogue like they’ve met a human being before (minus Brent Spiner) and a budget that accommodates the spectacle that Emmerich wants to put on display. It’s as bland and inoffensive as a film can possibly be, and it would be as quickly forgotten as comparably unmemorable sci-fi time-passers like 2013’s Oblivion and 2014’s The Signal were it not for the fact that it’s a follow-up to a movie that people have intense nostalgic fondness for.

But before I spend any more time deliberating on the differences between the sequel and the original, a brief plot outline: 20 years after the “War of 1996,” the various nations of the planet are largely unified into a single governmental body and with a singular planetary defense force. Doctor Ian Malcolm David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is director of Earth Space Defense, and his father Julius (Judd Hirsch) wrote a self-aggrandizing book and is living off of its profits on an apparently indestructible houseboat. Former President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is tended to by his daughter Patricia (It Follows’s Maika Monroe taking over for Mae “Her?” Whitman, because the latter is “not pretty enough” I guess), who is also a former space jet pilot and current staffer in the White House under President Sela Ward, who may have been given a character name but damned if I can recall it. Dylan Dubrow-Hiller (Jessie Usher replacing Ross Bagley), the stepson of Will Smith’s character in the first film, is the leader of a squadron of “legacy” pilots, including new characters Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth) and Charlie Miller (Travis Tope), who have been busted down to menial work after Morrison endangered Dylan in a practice flight. Also, Charlotte Gainsbourg is in this movie for some reason, as a researcher who thinks that a very simplistic icon that repeats itself in the drawings of people who were psychically connected to the aliens is important before disappearing as soon as the plot no longer needs her. Oh, and Brent Spiner is back as Dr. Okun, only this time he’s a major part of the plot in addition to service as one of the film’s four(!) comic relief characters. The plot follows the new generation (Hemsworth/Monroe/Usher) teaming up with the old (Spiner/Pullman/Goldblum) to destroy a new alien threat, which is the same as the old alien threat but bigger.

One of Emmerich’s trademarks is that his films (that aren’t the least historical historical pictures ever committed to film, like The Patriot and the utter garbage Anonymous) usually open with one character finding out about something, then that information being communicated to several other people before being disseminated to one of our protagonists. Stargate opens with a child in Egypt discovering something that becomes her life’s work, and then James Spader is eventually brought in to translate the hieroglyphics that kickstart the plot. In ID4, a signal is detected and the information is eventually escalated to the point that the president is awoken to be told this information. Often, someone of import will be in the middle of a party and then be called away to answer a phone call. As lazy as it is to repeat this trick over and over again, it’s a decent filmic way of using a gigantic cast of characters in order to convey a sense of scale. That’s part of what helped ID4 feel so global, but here the world of the film feels very small, and we see characters that we already know almost immediately. A lot of this has to do with the film’s world-building, which is another element that alienates this sequel from the original. The appeal of Independence Day is that it took place in our world, whereas Resurgence takes place on an Earth with antigravity helicopters, interplanetary “tugs” that can shuttle to the moon and back in a matter of minutes, a building that you don’t even realize is the rebuilt White House at first, and soldiers carrying around Halo-esque pulse rifles. Everything in the film is futuristic because it’s been reverse-engineered from alien tech; this needn’t inherently detract from the film, but it does mean that the world of Resurgence isn’t ours, and it’s hard to care about the stakes in this film when compared to the original. This entire film could take place on Alderaan or Arrakis for all that it resembles the 2016 we’re all living in. And when we live in a world where 9/11 imagery is used to “sell” the audience destruction on a massive scale in everything from Man of Steel to Transformers, Independence Day’s relatively tasteful and understated destruction and use of practical effects seems dated now, but Resurgence goes too far in the other direction, with the over-the- top devastation looking like outtakes from 2012 that were put back in the box for being too unbelievable.

There’s honestly too much to say about why this film fails as a sequel, so divorcing it from that context and viewing it as a run-of- the-mill sci-fi flick that combines absurd schlock (Judd Hirsch outrunning a tidal wave on a tiny boat is some ‘98 Godzilla shenanigans) with occasional tenderness (Monroe and Pullman pull off some damn fine interfamilial love) is the best way to enjoy it Resurgence, should you want to do so. There are interesting ideas aplenty: post-singularity life forms that exist elsewhere in the universe, an insular nation where a ground war against survivors of a crashed alien ship went on for a decade after the invasion proper was thwarted, and the haunted dreams of post-invasion survivors are all woefully underdeveloped in comparison to subplots that are useless and forgettable, like Charlie’s crush on the Chinese pilot, the tagalong auditor comic relief character, the busload of kids that Judd Hirsch rescues, and pointless rivalry between Dylan and Jake. The attempts to recreate the personal relationships of the first film fall flat, and it would have been better not to try at all.

Overall, Resurgence is too little, too late, and it doesn’t have the heart and charm that the original did to cover its flaws. But it exists now and we all have to live with it, so my advice is to either not bother or try to enjoy it as an Asylum flick that somehow got a big-screen budget.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond