The Moonfall Cast Didn't Have Much To Go On For The Movie's Space Scenes
If there's a large metropolitan city living on the edge of a water bank, chances are that Roland Emmerich has destroyed it. There's almost no section of the planet that the disaster connoisseur behind "Independence Day," "The Day After Tomorrow," and "2012" hasn't demolished for the sake of our entertainment. Although disaster movies have waned down since their rise in popularity, that doesn't mean Emmerich has slowed down one bit. Destroy Earth enough times and you seek a bigger target, so why not just go for the moon?
Last year's "Moonfall" follows Emmerich's cinematic conventions down to a tee, complete with the strained father/son relationship, comedic relief scientist, an all-star cast, and a buffet of destruction. The issue isn't that we've seen all of this before, but we've seen it done better by Emmerich himself, although /Film's Chris Evangelista seemed to have a great time according to his review. With that said, Emmerich commits to such a galaxy-brained revelation about what's actually going on, that I couldn't help but respect the audacity.
Before the cast of characters discover the world-shattering secret behind the moon's weird behavior as it hurtles towards Earth, they have to take off in a decommissioned NASA rocket while a tsunami overtakes the airbase. When pulled into the moon's orbit, they're witness to a sight that would send a conspiracy theorist into cardiac arrest. The actors, meanwhile, saw something very different. In fact, they didn't see anything at all.
Where's the moon?
While speaking with SciFiNow, "Moonfall" star Patrick Wilson talked about when you're working with a movie that's shooting primarily against green screen backgrounds, you kind of have to trust Captain Emmerich to know what he's doing. "You give yourself over to the vision of the director [during those scenes] and the art department and the VFX department," says Wilson. Acting against nothing even gave Halle Berry room to stretch her acting chops:
"What you see on screen is nothing of what we saw. We were actors sitting in a little tiny cockpit, looking out our window, seeing blue and green [...] So I take away with me, the understanding that I'm capable of doing that, and I challenged myself in a new way."
When you have a visual effects-heavy project like "Moonfall," the actors aren't exactly going to be spending a lot of time filming in an actual disaster. Unless your name is Tom Cruise, the chances of an actor actually filming their scenes in the vacuum of space is not going to happen. It's the nature of working with green screens, which has trained generations of performers to work opposite nothing. You may have some indicators of what you're looking at, but it usually won't be until the film comes out that you get to see what it looks like. I don't even know how you prepare an Academy Award-winning actress for the madness that transpires in the film's second half anyways.
"Moonfall" is currently streaming on HBO Max.