A silly mission to a falling moon

    It's not easy to know where to begin writing about a movie such as Moonfall.  Director Roland Emmerich's latest helping of sci-fi offers a ragged patchwork of elements, none  particularly interesting. 

   To put it bluntly, Moonfall - which stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson -- qualifies as a poorly written, badly constructed attempt by Emmerich once again to put the Earth and all its inhabitants in grave danger.

   In the age of CGI and convincing portrayals of space travel, one of the worst things you can say about a sci-fi movie is that it's too silly to be taken seriously. In Moonfall, Emmerich breaks new ground in absurdity.

   The story hinges on a mammoth conceit: One day, the moon  mysteriously alters its orbit, triggering a series of earthquakes and tidal waves. Wholesale devastation begins as the moon enters a collision course with Earth.

   There's little more you need to know, except that Berry and Wilson play former astronauts who wind up trying to save the world. They're helped by a brainy oddball (John Bradley) who predicted the impending catastrophe but was considered too much of a crackpot to be taken seriously.

  A couple of subplots are tossed into the mix, slowing the roll of the Earth-saving mission while introducing half-hearted themes about the nobility of sacrifice.  Carolina Bartczak, Michael Pena, and Charlie Plummer appear in supporting roles in these earthbound segments.   

   Once a hero, Wilson's Brian Harper is a ruin of a man. Harper was blamed for the death of a fellow astronaut during a space mission. No one believed his explanation, which was tied to the movie's conspiratorial revelations.

  Berry's Jo Fowler was also a part of that ill-fated mission, seen in a prologue set a decade before the main plot kicks in. 

   Once disaster strikes, the secondary characters flee the West Coast for Colorado. I guess the mountains are supposed to save them from destruction.

   Wilson should be excused if he sometimes looks confused. Who wouldn't be with a story such as this? Berry does her best to bring conviction to every line she utters. I guess someone had to act as if any of this matters.

   Why is the moon suddenly circling closer to Earth? 

    Turns out the moon is a hollow mega-structure that may have been created by aliens. Fowler, Harper, and Bradley's KC Houseman  eventually find themselves steering their spaceship through a hole leading to the moon's innards.

    Amidst an exposition-heavy ending, the screenplay spits out themes involving artificial intelligence. 

    Did I mention that a lethal dark force zips through the movie in what resembles a cloud composed of lead filings. Its purpose: the destruction of biological life.

   If you're a Berry fan, you may be disappointed that her character seems to fade from view as the movie reaches its conclusion, a loony attempt at something you might think of as techno-mysticism set deep inside the moon's gyroscopic interior.

    Emmerich's movies (Independence Day, Godzilla, and White House Down) rely heavily on mass destruction. No surprise, then, that Moonfall offers more of the same.

   Moonfall can feel like a dated helping of sci-fi, a cinematic visitor from a time when such movies didn't worry about making sense. In some hands, that might have been entertaining, but Emmerich's Moonfall proves more folly than fun.

   It's not only the moon that's hollow; it's the whole damn movie.

Another alien attack. Ho Hum.

They're back. Aliens take another shot at Earth in scattershot Independence Day: Resurgence.

Independence Day: Resurgence wasn't made available to critics until its Thursday night opening. That doesn't necessarily mean that the movie was being hidden from critical view or that audiences should presume that Resurgence will be a misguided mess.

You can judge for yourself if you venture into Resurgence. My vote: The massive size of the alien craft in Resurgence -- some 3,000 miles in diameter -- is matched by an equally massive lack of imagination. If director Roland Emmerich was trying to re-capture the entertainment magic he found in the 1996 original, the trick fell flat.

Off-the-rack plotting and cliched dialogue mark what appear to be a scattershot collection of scenes. Watching Resurgence is a bit like watching a boxer throw nothing but jabs -- most of them missing their target. The movie flails.

Here's one indication of the fall-off since '96. Jeff Goldblum, an actor who knows how to create characters of cynical intelligence, seems to be imitating himself as Dr. David Levinson. He's off his game.

It may not be fair to say that Resurgence is imitating the first movie, but it has a derivative feel as earthlings battle giant creatures who arrive on a spacecraft that destroys large parts of the Earth before anyone can figure out what to do about it.

By now, everyone knows that Will Smith -- hero of the first movie -- sat this one out. Maybe he didn't want to participate in space battles that look like Star Wars knockoffs. Maybe he's tired to carrying blockbuster-sized burdens.

A screenplay credited to five writers, including Emmerich, makes room for fresh blood. Liam Hemsworth shows up as a fighter pilot as does Jesse T. Usher, who's portraying the son of the character Smith played in the first movie.

Sela Ward signs on as the new, strictly business president of the US.

Of course, some of the actors from the 1996 edition return: These include Bill Pullman, now a former president who has nightmares about another alien invasion. Brent Spiner reprises his role as Dr. Okun, a guy who has been in a coma since 1996, and who, as a result, hasn't had a haircut in two decades. Judd Hirsch drops by as Goldblum's grumpy but supposedly lovable father.

Most of the jokes implode and the story -- Earth vs. a queen-bee alien -- is just one more exercise in overkill from a movie that looks as if it had been hastily assembled under threat of alien invasion; i.e. plot elements and characters are introduced without finesse. Worse yet, Resurgence builds little tension; it just just hurtles along, leaving nothing in its wake but planetary destruction and something we already have in large enough supply, disappointment.

'Stonewall' shortchanges realty

Roland Emmerich makes a film about the birth of the gay rights movement.

The Stonewall riots of 1969 are credited with having ignited America's gay rights movement. The riots were triggered by an early morning police raid of The Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-owned Greenwich Village bar that was patronized by transgender people, homeless gays, gay prostitutes, a portion of the lesbian community, as well as by gays simply looking for a place to meet.

The riots, which extended over several nights, are the ostensible subject of director Roland Emmerich's Stonewall, a movie misguidedly built around a fictional clean-cut Midwesterner who arrives in New York for what's made to look like a crash-course in gay life.

About now, you may be asking, "Emmerich? The director known for mega-movies such as Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 B.C., and White House Down? That Roland Emmerich?"

The answer is yes, and although Emmerich deserves credit for changing his disaster-movie pace, the resultant film is hampered by a decision to build its drama around Danny (Jeremy Irvine), a gay Indiana kid whose football-coach father (David Cubitt) banishes him.

Danny's small-town downfall culminates when he's caught having sex with the team's quarterback (Karl Glusman), an ambivalent young man who falsely insists that Danny got him drunk and seduced him.

A heartbroken Danny heads to New York City in hopes that he can enroll at Columbia University, where he has a scholarship waiting -- providing his parents send in the necessary papers.

Danny quickly falls in with a scruffy crowd on Christopher Street, characters who introduce Danny to the unforgiving rigors of street life, which for many of them involves prostitution.

Principal among these street waifs is Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), a Puerto Rican kid who falls for Danny. Ray fantasizes about making a home with Danny, but he's stuck in a life in which dreams never come true.

Ron Perlman shows up as Ed Murphy, the guy who operated the Stonewall. Murphy, the movie tells us, also pimped defenseless young men to wealthy homosexuals.

Danny eventually finds himself torn between a sexy but stalwart member of the organized gay community (Jonathan Rhys Myers) and the street kids represented by Ray. Tension develops between those who want to legitimize protest and those who wind up throwing bricks.

Emmerich may have wanted to give the movie a main character with whom mainstream audiences more easily could identify. But by turning Stonewall into Danny's story (complete with flashbacks to Danny's stifling high school days), Emmerich shortchanges the political cauldron out of which the gay rights movement arose.

Moreover, John Robin Baitz's overly schematic screenplay tends to squeeze the humanity out of most of the characters surrounding Danny.

Emmerich captures some of the turbulence of the '60s, a period in which life could feel as if it were coming apart at the seams, but there's a faux quality to Stonewall, perhaps because its drawn in such emphatic strokes that it can feel almost cartoonish.