When the Moon Hits You

 We mainly watched Moonfall (2022) because it got so much love from the How Did This Get Made podcast. Like them we loved it (as far as that goes).

It starts with astronaut Patrick Wilson, along with Halle Berry and some guy in a red shirt on a routine space shuttle mission. They seem to be attacked by a weird black cloud or swarm. They lose the red shirt, but Wilson manages to land safely. NASA blames the incident on him, and he is forced to resign in disgrace. His wife leaves him and marries Michael Pena, who, as they repeatedly discuss on HDTGM, owns a Lexus dealership.

Meanwhile, John Bradley is close to proving his crackpot theory: That the moon is an artificial hollow megastructure that will be turned into a weapon against Earth. When he sends his data to various agencies, he doesn't get much support. But it's Astronaut Day! He realizes that an astronaut will be meeting some school kids at Griffith Park Observatory. And once he finishes sleeping off his hangover, that astronaut is Patrick Wilson. Who also ridicules the theory.

But we soon find out it is true. NASA sends a mission to the moon, and finds a bottomless pit that shouldn't be there. They get ready to go down, but that black swarm appears and wipes them out. So I guess NASA believes Wilson, along with Bradley. In fact, NASA official Donald Sutherland admits they knew it all along, but didn't want to cause a panic. 

While this plot is going along, we are reminded that Roland Emmerich is directing this. So there are floods, earthquakes, and destruction. Gravity is acting weird, sometimes screwing things up, sometimes allowing a Lexus to jump a destroyed bridge. Eventually, it allows Wilson, Berry, and Bradley to get a space shuttle out of a museum and fly it to the moon. (Space shuttle now bearing the graffiti, "Fuck the Moon". Yeah!) At least they didn't drive a Lexus there. 

Ok, megastructure, nanotech, ancient aliens, black hole, white dwarf, yada, yada. This section had a lot less of the sensawonda than I was hoping. Big Dumb Objects in SF can be awe-inspiring, or just sort of drab. Maybe we were just getting worn out by this time. Anyway, it all ends happily, except for the millions who died and the cities that were destroyed. I can't imagine how they will handle the sequel. Probably as well as ID2.