Here's The First Teaser For Roland Emmerich's Moonfall
"If you like my movies," Roland Emmerich told Deadline back in 2019, "you'll like this movie. It's very much like '2012' and 'Independence Day.'" The director and writer of "The Day After Tomorrow" was speaking to the outlet following a buyer's session in Cannes, where he'd shared his upcoming sci-fi project, "Moonfall," and its then-ticket price of a $150M budget, ultimately picked up by Lionsgate. By February of 2021, shooting had wrapped on the ambitious project, which had overcome a variety of Roland Emmerich-esque obstacles in order to shoot during a global pandemic and without the backing of a "big five studio" at that (via Deadline). Roughly three months later, the film's February 4, 2022 release date had been announced, and now, a brand new teaser for the epic, planetary collision disaster pic has become available.
The film stars Halle Berry as former astronaut Jo Fowler, the protagonist who comes up with a plan "so crazy it just might work" to keep the moon from literally falling into earth (hence the title). Patrick Wilson ("Insidious") and John Bradley ("Game of Thrones") round out Fowler's team, with Wilson leading the charge as a seasoned astronaut and Bradley filling the necessary sci-fi role of amateur expert conspiracy theorist.
Moonfall teaser reveals some surprisingly relevant plot elements
While the notion of scientists scrambling to keep an astral body from crashing into earth and destroying all life might sound vaguely familiar (see: "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact"), the latest teaser for "Moonfall" reveals Emmerich had some brand new tricks up his sleeve for the age-old "the sky is falling" narrative.
"We're not prepared for this," Berry's Fowler says ominously at the start of the teaser. It's a phrase that resonates as the world continues to struggle with a global pandemic for which it truly was unprepared and one that sets the tone for a film that promises to imbue its Armageddon narrative with all-too-relevant themes and subtext. Between flashes of deadly tidal waves and other expected Emmerich disaster effects and bouts of panic (civil unrest, rioting, etc.), we learn that since 1969, the U.S. Government and NASA have been keeping a deadly secret about what happened in the two minutes that Apollo 11 lost contact with Houston.
"They found something on that day," a gravely-voiced Donald Sutherland explains, "that they kept hidden for 50 years. And now...it's too late to stop." The teaser gives us a few terrifying glimpses of what the famed NASA team found up there, but it's Sutherland who delivers the foreboding reality that sets the film apart: "This planet has suffered five extinctions," he says, and "this is going to be the sixth."
You can decide for yourself (via the "Moonfall" teaser on YouTube) if Fowler's ragtag team of astronauts and one conspiracy theorist will manage to stop an extinction that the government knew all about but chose, for some reason, to keep to itself.