This article contains minor spoilers for Moonfall (2022).
Roland Emmerich has killed billions of people. Since 1984, through his time crafting flicks for the big screen (with an emphasis on “big” here; this is a man who made a $100 million independent film), Emmerich has only been trying harder and harder to destroy Planet Earth with his movies. Whether through climate catastrophe, aliens, or an infamous Mayan prophecy, Emmerich has gleefully blown up the White House, the Vatican, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building throughout movies like Independence Day and 2012.
In his latest blockbuster, Moonfall, the moon’s trajectory alters mysteriously and is now hurtling towards our world. It’s monumental, it’s brash, it’s tremendously stupid, but is grounded by its (attempts at, anyway) human characters going through this horrible, catastrophic ordeal. At the center of it is Patrick Wilson’s disgraced astronaut, blamed by NASA for negligence ten years ago — whereas actually the same threat that killed off his team that day is back and threatening to destroy life as we know it.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
Wilson’s teenage son remains a focal point of the story also, as he leads a ragtag bunch of survivors seeking shelter. Coincidentally in tow with them is Halle Berry’s son, keeping the stakes high on Earth (with time running out), and in space (as the moon is confronted head on). Meanwhile, the boy’s father, Halle Berry’s ex-husband, has his finger on the trigger of the nukes.
The whole movie is a mess, honestly, with large chunks of exposition surrounded by the cheap plot device of an omniscient US government with access to everything, and pretty much nothing reflects any working system in reality; often ridiculous, it’s part of the DNA of how spectacularly bananas this movie really is. Critic Mark Kermode dubbed the romp as “radioactively dumb,” but looking back through Roland Emmerich’s destructive body of work reveals a single recurring theme through countless movies: Fathers and sons against the apocalypse.
Total Destruction Was My Father’s Name!
Lionsgate
In 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) must travel across the US to save his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) against a severe and drastic change in weather, all the while keeping his boy clued in on how to survive the process. In Emmerich’s (genuinely superb) Independence Day, cocksure air fighter pilot Will Smith has a young son at home, who is believed to be killed by the alien attack. Smith’s co-star, introverted David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), has an extremely close relationship with his own father as well; a man who would shadow his in-the-know son throughout the entire run time.
In the final battle, Randy Quaid’s son watches from the control room as his washed-up (and assumed-to-be deranged) father sacrifices himself to save the day in a kamikaze kind of last hurrah, his perceived former insanity actually being revealed as a sort of insider knowledge. 2016’s sequel to Independence Day would remove Smith’s Captain Hiller entirely from the story, no less replacing him with… his now adult son from the first movie.
On top of directing these movies, Roland Emmerich was also credited as a writer on each as well. With such a long list of examples (and a creative say in its characters) the father-son relationship seems to be a recurring theme that Emmerich is more than happy to return to again and again. Even Joey, his first real film (after his thesis project The Noah’s Ark Principle), is about a nine-year-old boy trying to reconnect with his dead father through supernatural means.
Level-Headedness in the Face of Danger
20th Century Fox
Nothing anchors an outlandish disaster — be it the moon, climate change, earthquakes, Godzilla, terrorists in the White House, aliens, etc. — like a sense of family. As ludicrous as all of Roland Emmerich’s ideas may be, a relationship with a father (be that good, or more often frayed in these cases) is something that literally every audience member can relate to. Add to his movies some universal themes like a workaholic father, or an alcoholic father, or a disgraced father (outside their fictional lives as two-dimensional American caricatures who hold down top jobs in the 1%), and we are finally given something to relate to in between the pure Hollywood fantasy.
Amongst the spectacle of Roland Emmerich movies and the taste of yellowy overpriced popcorn in between your teeth, there is a thread of reality to keep our beliefs (and attention spans) hooked.
These very fictional characters are constantly bombarded by the reminder that, yes, there is something (or someone, in these cases) still worth fighting for amongst the debris of their high-budget CGI armageddons. The growth for these clichéd Hollywood heroes comes from surviving this ordeal, coming away from it and working on their fragile relationships with their children; post this otherworldly chaos that they have both just survived. By the time the credits are ready to roll, all of these movies share pretty much the exact same ending: the estranged parent is reunited in the foreground of a bright, beaming sun, and then they hug; presumably living past the credits and leading richer lives together. It’s genuinely that simple, and is repeated multiple times in most Roland Emmerich movies, from his early German films to his English work after his first big breaks with Universal Soldier and Stargate
On his movie 2012, a picture featuring John Cusack’s determined father risking his life to save his kids from a deadly earthquake, Emmerich talked to Zamm about how his emphases on familial relationships have been steadily increasing, saying:
Off the screen, you get a sense that family in general is an important factor for the German-born Emmerich. Having co-founded the production company Centropolis Entertainment with his sister, Ute Emmerich, the two have been involved in making movies side by side since 1985. Having worked together professionally for so long, Ute’s role is now acting as executive producer on Roland’s films, and her Facebook page highlights her many on-set rendezvous with her brother. Talking to CNN in 2008, Ute noted that their own father was “very, very supportive” of Roland’s early career, going as far as to let his son use office space in their gardening tools factory, and lent a hand financing his first films.
I always knew that we would be heavy in visual effects. We tried to counter this with more character development and stories. It was really our goal. Yes, we have more effects than I’ve ever had, but I think we also have more character development than I ever had in a movie. So it’s kind of a balance that we have.
If you don’t like Roland Emmerich’s movies, nothing is going to change that. Nonetheless, this is an artist keeping the smoking crater that is the Disaster Movie alive for audiences craving escape from the disaster that is everyday life. As a European artiste, he would turn his back on the trends of his home country and create original movies in an American sandbox of Stars and Stripes and can-do attitudes battling insurmountable odds. His movies have become a go-to for the tentpole Hollywood blockbuster and a Flanderization of them all in one.
As a foreigner to the States, he has stubbed out the pencil-thin cigarettes of his art-house roots in order to smoke the cigar-chomping, alien face-punching of Will Smith, and other Hollywood stars in his Hollywood movies. Are Roland Emmerich movies going to continue being merely a variation on a theme (disaster, and surviving it as father and son)? Yes. Are a good majority of us audience members going to continue buying tickets and ignoring the basic plots featuring surprisingly tender and consistent father-son relationships, for the upside of seeing the whole f**king moon colliding with the Earth? Hell yeah we are. We trust Roland Emmerich, like any good dad, to provide.
