The Morning Watch: Moonfall Edition - Honest Trailer, Making The Tsunami & More
(The Morning Watch is a recurring feature that highlights a handful of noteworthy videos from around the web. They could be video essays, fan-made productions, featurettes, short films, hilarious sketches, or just anything that has to do with our favorite movies and TV shows.)
In this special edition, to celebrate Roland Emmerich's insane new disaster epic "Moonfall" arriving on home video, watch the Honest Trailer that celebrates how dumb this movie is and doesn't hesitate to poke fun at the nonsense. Plus, see how the film created a huge tsunami that chased Patrick Wilson and John Bradley with both practical and digital effects. And finally, watch a trailer remix for "Moonfall" done in the style of epic disaster films of the 1990s, complete with pan and scan and cheesy VFX.
The Moonfall Honest Trailer crashes down
First up, Screen Junkies haven't delivered an Honest Trailer for "The Batman" (at least not yet), so they decided to "save as many brain cells" as they could and go with a simpler movie, preferably one about the moon falling down on Earth. The "Moonfall" Honest Trailer pokes fun at how much Roland Emmerich must hate the planet Earth, given how often he blows it up in his movies. Honestly, this movie is so ludicrous but enjoyable that this mocking trailer can't even match its craziness. Sure, the trailer can make fun of the insane twist and call the film's villain Alexa, but the revelation is much, much weirder in the actual movie.
That being said, "The real moon is the family we made along the way," is a great joke.
Making waves in Moonfall
Next, one of the best scenes in "Moonfall" isn't about pieces of the moon falling to Earth, but what happens to our oceans when it gets too close. More specifically, it's a scene where a huge tsunami flows into the city and nearly kills Patrick Wilson's disgraced astronaut. Though the exterior scenes show a big CG-wave dragging dozens of big yachts around, a new behind-the-scenes video from Lionsgate shows practical effects were used to make the interior part of the scene come to life. Indeed, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley were on the set of a hotel lobby that was flooded with wave after wave of water poured from a huge water tank, and the results are both terrifying and technically impressive.
What if Moonfall was released in the 1990s?
Finally, you have watched the trailer for "Moonfall," you have hopefully watched the actual movie "Moonfall." Now you can watch a fake retro trailer for the film done in the style of 1990s sci-fi movies. The folks at Nerdist re-edited the trailer for "Moonfall" to appear like the hottest sci-fi movie of 1990-something, complete with pan and scan, poor fire effects, and an epic narrator that hypes up the film with cheesy likes like, "In July 1969, we went to the moon. We always planned to return. But this year, the moon will come to us." But the best line in the trailer might be, "One small step for man ... one giant fall for moonkind."