Nearly every beat of Roland Emmerich’s latest sci-fi/disaster film, Moonfall, borrows heavily from the tidy formula he’s established in his previous spectacle-laden blockbusters – from the disgraced hero brought back to save the day to the crackpot scientist who knows more about what’s really going on than the actual experts. Not to mention the world-ending destruction amped up to the largest scale imaginable. While Emmerich has dabbled in pseudo-science in his previous films, it seems unwise it is to indulge so heavily in conspiracy theories like the one that anchors Moonfall’s plot – especially at a time when distrust of science is at an all-time high. There are a handful of stunning images sprinkled throughout the ugly and incomprehensible CGI-action sequences – the “gravity waves” that arrive during a space shuttle launch is especially inventive. But the rest of the film succumbs to the “more is more” maxim of modern filmmaking and becomes so busy and cacophonous that it’s hard to care about what we see on the screen. It doesn’t help that green screen exteriors and shoddy interior production design give the film an artificial blandness throughout. Attempts to inject humor into the narrative fall flat, and both Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry do what they can with their roles, but the entire film is full of one-note, paper-thin characters that consistently drain the life out of every scene. The film’s final act gives us a last-minute info dump of exposition spelling everything out, resolving any lingering mystery, and pushing the narrative from the absurd into absolute silliness. There is the skeleton of a decent idea here – if it had been tightened up throughout and the script didn’t launch us into the disaster without taking the time to effectively pace out its opening scenes – there was the potential for this to be a lot of fun rather than the goofy slog it ended up becoming.