Halle Berry Is Making A Roland Emmerich Disaster Movie
Can Halle Berry save the planet? She'll be playing a NASA executive. Here's what else we know so far.
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Halle Berry has traveled to space on other film projects, but we’re about to see her do it in an exciting new way. This time around, she’ll be playing NASA executive Jo Fowler as she teams up with others to try and stop the moon from crashing into planet earth. This is a fair time to mention that disaster films of this nature aren’t made for their scientific accuracy as much as they are great special effects, action, and a big threat that’s interesting, if not realistic. Moonfall promises to nail the genre on the head.
Halle Berry’s joined up with an expert in the genre for this project. Roland Emmerich loves making disaster movies. He’s the mind behind the Stargate movie that started the franchise, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, and White House Down. In a lot of his most notable work, the world is ending. In 2019, the world found out he was about to destroy it again in the latest movie he wrote and directed. Moonfall is an indie film made on a $140 million budget–a shockingly high budget for an indie project. Moonfall was picked up by Lionsgate at Cannes in 2019. All was expected to move forward rapid-fire from there, but then the pandemic caused 2020 delays. Now, Deadline is reporting that Moonfall finally has a release date we can count on. We will be seeing Moonfall release in theaters on February 4, 2022.
So, we know that Halle Berry will be an executive for NASA. She’ll be joined by Patrick Wilson, who will be playing an astronaut named Brian Harper, and John Bradley, will be playing a conspiracy theorist named K.C. Houseman. Others joining the cast include Michael Peña, Charlie Plummer, and Donald Sutherland.
The story description for Moonfall is one that is full of genre tropes and tension. Why is the world ending this time? Because the moon has been knocked out of orbit by a mysterious force. A crew is assembled to travel to the moon and hopefully stop it from colliding with the planet Earth. Halle Berry and team have only a few weeks to resolve the problem before the world ends. It seems realistic that the film will likely have a great deal of footage showing the moon getting larger and larger in view from Earth. When the crew gets to the moon, they’re going to discover more about the mysterious force that has caused such dire problems for the team’s home planet.
This story idea has a lot in common with other disaster movies we’ve seen where objects are coming to collide with planet Earth. For example, the 1998 Bruce Willis movie, Armageddon. In that film, the team of oil drillers were sent to space so they could break up an asteroid. While we haven’t seen the moon coming for our planet yet in a movie, something similar happened in Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel Seveneves. In that novel, the moon isn’t coming for Earth, instead, it disintegrates. It turns out, not having the moon would be terrible for life on Earth. That novel focuses on how to keep a select few humans alive while mostly embracing that the life on the planet is over.
It’s easy to see why Roland Emmerich, Lionsgate, and Halle Berry are on board for this particular project with Moonfall. This is a movie that takes the classic disaster movie elements fans appreciate but with a spin they haven’t seen before.
