Moonfall: you’ll be slumped, bored and bewildered

Moonfall (12A), (130 mins), Cineworld Cinemas

Somehow the moon has been knocked off its orbit which somehow means that once it gets to a certain point, it’s going to start showering us all with massive boulders.

The seas will rise up, snow will descend, oxygen will dwindle, and that, ladies and gentlemen, will be that.

Which is, in fact, a measure of the sheer disappointment that Moonfall brings. It’s difficult to be awfully bothered.

With all that’s happening, with all that’s at stake, it’s a film which really ought to drag us ever so slightly towards the edge of our seats.

Instead, you’ll be slumped, bored and bewildered, checking your watch, thinking ‘Well, if the world is going to end, it might as well do so soon so we can all get home.” Which is, of course, hardly the point.

When you talk about disaster movies, it shouldn’t be the film itself that’s the disaster. And in fact, this one is largely so-so for the first hour and a bit.

But once all the rocks start falling – and they do so endlessly – and once all those buildings start crumbling under the weight of the oceans, it all gets decidedly dreary.

Think how fantastic, how intense, say, Apollo 13 was. With this, as the peril is supposedly ramped up, the duller it gets.

As the earth gets hammered, the future of all of us is in the hands of a mismatched threesome.

John Bradley is KC Houseman, an amateur geeky scientist to whom no one listens because his theories seem mad, but guess what, they aren’t.

He joins on the rescue mission Halle Berry as Jocinda Fowl and Patrick Wilson as Brian Harper, former astronauts who have got history between them. Ten years before they were on a space mission which ended in the death of a colleague. Brian was blamed and publicly disgraced; Jocinda, while not exactly turning on him, hardly stood up for him.

There’s plenty of snarling.

But the bizarrest thing is that after ten years out of the loop, Brian is perfectly able to jump into a space ship again and fly it perfectly. Blimey. Some of us forget some of the functions on the work computer if we don’t use them every week. But Brian, thank goodness, is a master of his craft, every single one of those gazillions of buttons and dials at his beck and call.

And so off we go on a bid to save the world which gets ever stranger. The penny drops. As one of the characters suddenly realises “We are in the middle of an intergalactic war that has been going on for billions of years.” So what, you’ll think as you ponder what you’re having for tea.

The same character remarks that none of this makes sense. The trouble is that he’s more worried by this than his audience will ever be.

Meanwhile, back on earth, the intrepid trio’s rellies are trying to get to safety. The last hour flits between up there and down here, but it’s difficult not to be a little bit beyond caring. One of the problems is that the film tries to be jokey – and the tone doesn’t work. All-out laughs might have been fine; all-out peril would have been good. Instead we get the worst of both worlds.