Every year around this time, one can depend on a new Liam Neeson action movie to be released. This is also the time of the year that some of the weakest movies of each year are released. Unfortunately for Neeson just about all of the movies he has made since the huge hit Taken in 2008 have been about him playing just about the same character every time. This is not only the problem with this movie, but is also the main reason for the extremely low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes of only 6%. For the record, this movie is not a 6% rating, but it is not any better than 50% either. We have seen all of this before, with the one exception that this time around Neeson is a fixer of other agents who go rogue and its his job to save them and turn them around.
Other issues with this story is the skipping-around-mix-it-up-confusing scenes that very often are not connected enough, making most of the story annoying. One theory I have always had about Liam Neeson is that he makes so many movies because he is still trying to get over his wife dying in a very tragic freak skiing accident in 2009. Unfortunately, making this many movies and way too many bad ones may eventually wreck his acting career.
There is no way anyone could recommend Backlight, which also has a title that makes no sense.
Other than perhaps Doris Day, Jennifer Lopez now just might be the #1 female Rom Com (Romantic Comedy) actor of all time. If you see enough of her movies, you realize that when you see a new one, like “Marry Me”, they all pretty much seem the same. The only big difference this time around is that the story is so off the wall that it rides the line of unbelievability more than any of her other movies. Marry Me is one of those movies that anyone can realize the entire story just by seeing the movie Trailer. Two major celebrity singers are about to get married onstage, but Lopez notices that her soon to be husband has recently cheated on her, so she marries a random man in the audience, played by Owen Wilson, who is a high school math teacher. This is a completely stupid idea, that for some reason was greenlighted and funded into a film.
I thought overall the movie is not that bad, with some good moments including the appearance Sara Silverman as Owen Wilson’s friend, but the story is so predictable and boring in too many areas to say that this insane idea here was worth a try. The ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for Marry Me are an accurately low 57%. For Jennifer Lopez die hard fans, pay for a one month trial of Peacock and save the movie fee. For the rest of us, just see the trailer for this movie – and save the two hours of sitting through predictable mess.
“Hollywoodize” is a word I have tried to popularize at various times during the life of this movie blog, now over 7 years old. Hollywoodize is when a good idea or story is considered not marketable enough or not “special-effects” enough, that some of those in charge of greenlighting the script are afraid that it might not make enough money. They think that showing an exciting trailer will get people into the theaters, no matter how idiotic the story is.
In the case of the new movie “Moonfall”, the idea about the Moon crashing into the Earth is new and very unique but unfortunately, they threw the kitchen-sink at this story dumping on so many stupid ideas and story twists that the entire movie is too deeply mired in absurdity. For a story involving the moon slowly degrading its orbit and crashing into the Earth, the only idea that would work logically or scientifically is a huge asteroid hitting the Moon with enough force that it slightly changes the Moon’s orbit causing environmental catastrophe on Earth. Then the challenge for the screenwriter would be to come up with brilliant scientific ideas where scientists on Earth figure out some way to fix this giant problem. I am sure the writers thought of this originally, but then thought – this is not nearly marketable enough for the Trailer.
For Moonfall, that has no less than 3 screenwriters, Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen, it turns out that the moon is hollow and an alien race has some kind of a world inside the moon and tiny Artificial Intelligence creatures that fly like swarms of bees. I have seen swarm of bees in space special effects in a previous Star Trek movie, so they probably thought to save money, “lets reuse the swarm of space bees software from a few years ago”. The explanation as to how these AI creatures are degrading the Moon’s orbit or why, was never fully explained. The alien people who live inside the Moon are also never seen – probably due to budget cuts.
As far as the characters in this bad movie, starting with a scientist who works as a fast food restaurant, played by John Bradley, an astronaut turned head of NASA, played by Hale Berry and another astronaut, played by Patrick Wilson who are all eventually hired to save the world, using – believe it or not – an old space shuttle that has been retired to a museum and defaced by graffiti due to the world-is-coming-to-an-end-riots. The chain of events in this film, where Hale Berry goes from being an astronaut to the head of NASA, and an unemployed scientist, who works at a fast food restaurant, is added to the Space Shuttle crew, could be the stupidest I have ever seen within any science fiction or action movie. It seems the 3 writers of this screenplay worked separately and then later tried to combine their work into a mess of illogic that all who see this movie will be glad is finally over. The actor Michael Pena plays the husband of Wilson’s x-wife and his part in this movie is getting some people to Colorado – where much of the secondary part of this bad story seemed to only be about filling out 2 hours of time.
As an aspiring screenwriter, like so many others, I have always been continually amazed at how much money and time has been thrown at bad movies like this one. There is nothing good here, nothing that makes sense or enjoyable to see, other than maybe a few special effects that seemed to be taken from other space movies, including even Gravity, released in 2013. This is a total waste of two hours. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are a very low 41% with IMDB an equally low 5.5 and I agree with these ratings, with mine around 25%. Miss this mess and see any other science fiction movie instead.
A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies. 