Review: 'Moonfall' is a science-fiction mash-up that's silly and stupid, even by the standards of 'Independence Day' director Roland Emmerich

Director Roland Emmerich has made a career out of facepalm-inducing dumb science-fiction — from “Independence Day” (where Jeff Goldblum found alien tech was Mac-compatible) to “The Day After Tomorrow” (where Jake Gyllenhaal outran cold) to “2012” (which treated plate tectonics like Chutes and Ladders).

But he outdoes himself with the silliness of “Moonfall,” a bombardment of fake-science nonsense and ludicrous action set pieces. It’s a movie that seems designed for one purpose only: To make Neil deGrasse Tyson cry.

The prologue puts in outer space in 2011, as astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and a crewmate are on an EVA, while his — and “work wife,” as he puts it — Jocinda Fowl (Halle Berry) monitors things in the space shuttle’s cockpit. Then something big and ugly attacks the shuttle, killing the crewmate, knocking Jocinda unconscious, and forcing Brian to land the shuttle without power. NASA investigators don’t believe Brian’s account, Jocinda doesn’t back him up, and his life and reputation are destroyed.

Flash-forward to today, and a shady scientist, Dr. K.C. Houseman (John Bradley, who was the bookish Samwell Tarley on “Game of Thrones”) has the calculations to show the moon is out of orbit, but he can’t convince anyone at NASA to take him seriously. K.C. tries to enlist Brian — who’s now divorced with a troubled 18-year-old son, Sonny (Charlie Plummer) — to advocate for him with NASA, but, as Brian says, “NASA and I aren’t on speaking terms.”

Not necessary, as it turns out NASA has spotted the moon’s orbital problems already, and Jocinda — now second-in-command at NASA — and the folks at Mission Control see something inexplicable: A deep hole in the middle of a massive moon crater. The hole is at the same spot Brian said the space anomaly emerged a decade before.

This being a Roland Emmerich movie — he cowrote with Harald Kloser, his regular collaborator and composer, and Spenser Cohen — things start going haywire. Gravity shifts and high tides cause disasters, flooding the west coast, and sending the top of the Chrysler building airborne. Jocinda has a desperate plan, to unretire a space shuttle and get a crew to the moon. And since staffing decisions like this are decided by which characters have the steepest redemption arc, and which actors have top billing, you know that it’s going to be Brian, Jocinda and K.C. in the cockpit.

All of this is fine, as far as it goes, and Emmerich still knows how to introduce a lot of potentially interesting characters and stage exciting escape scenes. (Nice job working in the Lexus product placement, too, by casting Michael Peña as a car-salesman stepdad for Sonny.) But as the moon gets dangerously close to Earth, and gravity waves turn up to down, the movie throws everything at the screen except common sense.

Of course, any disaster movie today — whether it means to or not — must carry the burden of becoming a metaphor for our current struggles with COVID-19 and climate change. With “Moonfall,” the danger comes in the way Emmerich treats scientists, the people who understand what’s going on, as either crackpots or nerdy know-it-alls. And when the “science” they’re trying to explain is rank nonsense about “megastructures” and manufactured planets, the net effect is making science look like guesswork — and we don’t need any more voices doing that.

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‘Moonfall’

★★

Opens Friday, February 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, disaster action, strong language, and some drug use. Running time: 135 minutes.