Not a sequel to Skyfall, Moonfall is a Roland Emmerich flick about NASA rejects stopping the moon from colliding with Earth after discovering it is made of cheese. Only joking! It’s actually a megastructure built by our alien ancestors.

Even by Emmerich’s standards, Moonfall is straight out of the loony bin. Rather than the usual natural disaster or terrorist/alien invasion, the 2022 sci-fi combines the moon falling out of its orbit with a lunar Terminator subplot about rogue AI created by the same technologically advanced human ancestors who built the moon. “It’s everything we ever feared about AI,” Halle Berry intones sombrely.

This not only makes the movie baffling to follow, it also creates confusion around what exactly Emmerich is hoping to achieve. Where films like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 had very obvious environmental messages, Moonfall indulges in the kind of conspiracy theories usually reserved for social media or the White House. It is quite reassuring then that nobody watched it (the movie lost $140 million), ironically thanks to Covid and a massive storm closing American cinemas.

Moonfall‘s special effects have dated much better than its chummy references to Elon Musk, but this is all eclipsed by every single line of dialogue sounding like they were written for characters dancing naked in a field rather than wearing NASA uniforms. These include (but are by no means limited to), “The moon is going to help us,” “We scanned your consciousness, you’re part of the moon now,” and, “If the moon really is what you think it is, we’re gonna need a megastructuralist.”

Fortunately they have a megastructuralist (John Bradley) who is able to wander into high-security research facilities, an astronaut who has been retired for 10 years (Patrick Wilson), and a decommissioned yet ready-to-launch space shuttle in a museum. Emmerich never really explains why these astronots are better placed to deal with the situation than NASA, or why the moon’s descent immediately sends humanity into a state of looting and terrorism, or why everyone is obsessed with fleeing to Colorado, one of the most elevated parts of the country.

And while it would be lunacy to expect basic logic from a film about the moon knocked from its orbit by “some kind of self-aware, self-replicating singularity,” Moonfall‘s pseudoscientific onslaught gets old over 2+ hours, and your own life starts to wane before your very eyes. Or as Halle Berry so succinctly puts it: “The sand in the hour glass is dropping quickly for all of us.”