Everything about Moonfall feels like it could have been pulled from the 90s with little to no updating for modern audiences. The tropes are old. The ideas are old. Even the actors are pretty old and tired. While for a few minutes it lifts off for its more fantastical elements, Moonfall spends too much time grounded on earth to be enjoyable.

After experiencing an attack from unknown forces on a satellite maintenance mission, astronaut Brian Harper's career is sabotaged by Nasa and the event is covered up. 10 years later the force that killed his fellow astronaut turns to have an unknown link to the moon changing its orbit to begin a collision course with Earth and Brian must team up with a crazy conspiracy theorist whose ideas may not be so crazy by the end of the story.

Spoiler alert.

For real, spoiler alert. If you don't want spoilers, you should quit reading now. I'm going to talk about spoilers.

Okay... if you're still here...

It's AI. The mysterious force is ancient human-created AI that has broken free and decided it hated serving humans so it wiped out all of ancient humanity and now it's found the last vestiges of us in the universe and it's come to finish us off. The moon is a hollow spaceship, and the crazy conspiracy theorist was right all along.

Overall, if you shut your brain off, it's fine. But, that just wasn't enough for me this time. There are a few times where Moonfall rises above its source material to bath the audience in views of fantastically large visages of the moon towering over the earth while tides rise, but overall the approach is incredibly uneven. Characters weirdly spout exposition about what they're doing while they're doing it at odd times and in ways that don't really fix the scenes.

It's one of those experiences where the more you think about it the more it falls apart. If only I were blessed with a mind that could watch it and walk away without ever spending a second thought. But I keep thinking about things. Even the things I enjoyed begin to peel away with every moment of reflection and consideration until nothing is left. Like something that is spoiled, but, on the first bite tastes fine, only letting out its rancid flavors as you chew and absorb what's in it.

Give this one a pass. Even its freshest ideas were old in 2010. I'm tired of movies where AI is the badguy, that demonize science and advancement while solving the problem with the products of science, that elevate people who challenge and ignore science to heroes while portraying them as the smartest of all of us. I'm just so tired of everything this film represents.

Watch it when it comes on late on the sci-fi network if you must, but until then... just watch something better. There are so many better things out there.