Critics reviews

No, Moonfall is bad – the wrong kind of bad – because everything in this formula fails to hold up its end of the bargain. The effects are muddled; the supporting cast is terrible. The only thing Moonfall delivers on is the big ideas, but by the time the movie begins to layer in the sci-fi absurdity, the film is already three-quarters of the way home.

You're going for the CGI destruction, and even on those rubbly grounds, Moonfall is a disappointment, flitting by its destroyed vistas with a weird impatience... [Emmerich's latest is a] disaster flick can't even get its dumb-fun groove on.

The film is less like a full-fledged story than a series of notifications you might get on your phone, most of them couched in language that could have been generated by a buggy AI program.

“Moonfall” is a lumbering, long locomotive of one cliche attached to another, making time pass slowly even though there is so much juggling of these different one-dimensional relationships.

“Moonfall,” to its credit, harbors no illusions about being useful. I don’t know about mega-structures, but this particular moon is made of purest B-movie cheese.

Moonfall is a disaster epic that feels cramped and hurried, implying massive scope but not doing much to show it. Perhaps there wasn’t anything Emmerich could do to mitigate [the] pandemic challenges. I wish, then, that he’d waited until he could make the movie for real.

Recommending that someone actually subject themselves to [Moonfall], however, is a little like shoving three-month old milk under an unsuspecting person’s nose and inquiring, Does this smell ok? You already know the answer; you just need to share the pain.

The zany and somewhat Jules Verne-type revelations don’t put new life into the disaster genre; rather it feels as though the shark has jumped over the moon, resulting in what feel like hours and hours of solemn gibberish.

[Moonfall] is loud, fast-paced and untethered by logic, as well as gravity. While some might find it possible to have fun by surrendering to the silliness, this bad moon doesn't quite rise even to the level of a guilty pleasure.

Emmerich just tossed every sci-fi and disaster trope he could think of into a blender and hit “liquefy.” The result’s a whole lot lumpier than most palates will prefer.

The film sounds actively embarrassed by what it’s trying to pitch, and reverse-engineers its sci-fi elements to fit the default disaster template Emmerich could apply in his sleep. We’re promised the Moon, but sold a lemon.

This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth... for reasons that make as little sense as anything else.