Neil deGrasse Tyson, an experienced astrophysicist, breaks down Roland Emmerich’s science fiction movie Moonfall, giving it low marks for realism. Released in 2022, the disaster thriller followed Brian Harpert, a disgraced former astronaut, Jocinda Fowler, the head of NASA and K.C. Houseman, a conspiracy theorist and semi-scientist, as they journeyed to the moon in hopes of saving the earth from impending danger. The movie, whose cast featured such names as Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Donald Sutherland, Michael Peña, and Charlie Plummer, was a box office bomb, grossing only $67 million worldwide after a reported $138–146 million production budget.
In a video interview with SiriusXM‘s The Jess Cagle Show, Neil deGrasse Tyson explains that Moonfall violates more laws of physics per minute than he’s ever seen any other movie do. The famed astrophysicist took an issue with Moonfall’s premise of the hollow moon approaching earth, claiming that they create exaggerated solutions for problems that could be solved in much easier ways. The 64-year-old suggests that since there’s no friction in space, the asteroid could have been slightly nudged, and this would have prevented it from directly hitting the earth or alternatively, they could have slowed it down so that it’ll pass behind the earth. Read his full comments below:
Okay, so yes. More laws of per minute than any other movie ever made, ever, okay? That’s what I thought until I saw Moonfall. It was a pandemic film that came out, you know, Halle Berry and the moon is approaching Earth, and they learned that it’s hollow and there’s a moon being made out of rocks living inside of it and the Apollo missions were really to visit, to feed the moon being, and I just couldn’t, so I said, “Alright, I thought ‘Armageddon’ had a secure hold on this crown, but apparently not.” All you gotta do is just nudge it and if you do that early enough, if you nudge it like one centimeter per second to the right, in space, there’s no friction, so it’ll just keep drifting to the right. If you do that early enough, then you can have the asteroid pass in front of the earth rather than hit the earth, or you can slow it down so that it’ll pass behind the earth. Two ways you can adjust it. So, yeah. You know what it’s like? It’s like “The Terminator” thing where I want to kill your parents so that you’re never born. “Really?” All you have to do is prevent your parents from meeting each other or have them have sex 20 minutes later than the other one. That will create a different zygote, and you won’t be born, so the movies go, in some cases, they get hyperbolic on their solutions to problems.
Why Was Moonfall A Box Office Disaster
After initial predictions suggested that Moonfall might break even in the first few weeks of its release, the sci-fi movie dropped out of the box-office top ten just after its third week of release. After grossing $9.9 million in its opening weekend, the movie suffered a steep decline in its second weekend, earning a lowly $2.9 million. By the third week, it suffered even more decline, and it was made available on VOD platforms less than two months after its release in theaters. While this was in parts due to the severe February 2022 North American winter storm that forced over 300 theaters to shut down in Midwestern United States, Moonfall was mainly a flop because most viewers and critics felt it was simply bad.
A lot of the movie’s criticism lies in it’s incredibly silly plot, which critics and moviegoers alike found ridiculous. The plot was also riddled with so many unnecessary clichés and the chemistry between most of the cast was little to virtually non-existent in some cases. According to publishers like RelishMix, online reactions to Moonfall were mostly mixed to negative and “awareness stats ran under norms”.
Shortly before Moonfall’s release in February 2022, there were suggestions from Emmerich about the possibility of filming two sequels for the movie. However, with the negative critical reception that it garnered and considering it was also a box office failure, it is highly unlikely that we would be getting a follow-up. Even if a follow-up were to get off the ground, one can hope Emmerich finds a way to bring in more realistic science to his story.
