Lord of the galaxies
Roland Emmerich plays on a very big stage, and his latest, moon-based movie is no exception.
Germany-born director Roland Emmerich doesn’t only make big budget blockbusters in which he revels in bringing Earth as close to total destruction as possible, but it’s for these films that the 66-year-old is best known. Whether it’s the aliens of Independence Day, the climate change-induced Ice Age of The Day After Tomorrow or the fulfilment of ancient Mayan prophecies in 2012 —
Emmerich has made his name as the king of modern disaster cinema whose films have earned over $3bn (R45.8bn) in global box offices to date.
Speaking from the US ahead of the release of his latest sci-fi, almost-the-end-of-theworld -as-we-know-it action adventure Moonfall, Emmerich says he had no plans to make another disaster film until a book on the left-field ideas of megastructures intrigued him so much that he, together with longtime writing collaborator Harold Kloser, decided to write a script based on the idea.
That script has been realised as a typically edge-of-your-seat, polished piece of Emmerich action spectacle entertainment, in which two disgraced astronauts, played by Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry, must team up with an amateur physics conspiracy nut played by John Bradley to save the world after the moon shifts its orbit and sends the planet into chaos.
Though his long experience at the helm of big set-piece action vehicles has taught him a few tricks about keeping to budget and deadline, Emmerich admits that “there are always things that come up that you can’t plan for. For Moonfall, when we tested the first cut we realised that we were spending too much time on Earth but audiences wanted more stuff on the moon so we changed the balance to give them that”.
Several of his films have dealt with alternative versions of scientific or historical facts — government cover-ups of extraterrestrial life in his two Independence Day films; time-travelling aliens who helped build the Egyptian pyramids in Stargate; Mayan apocalyptic prophecies in 2012; and a particularly wacky idea about the moon that’s pivotal to the plot of Moonfall — but Emmerich is quick to point out that his interest in these theories is “purely because of the potential they have for making interesting drama”.
He’s surprised by the furious debate that the recent climate change satire Don’t Look Up generated and incredulous at the film’s central premise. “A comet is going to collide with Earth and we have six months until the end of the world? That’s way too much time. Also, we have more than enough threats to the survival of the planet on Earth at the moment
— just look at the millions of refugees in Syria and what’s going on there.”
He hopes those movie lovers who make the effort to go to cinemas and see Moonfall “will be entertained and excited because that’s what these films are about really. They’re escapism and these days, we all need some escape.”