"Moonfall" is a movie about the moon collapsing onto Earth – and that's the simple part.
We haven't even gotten to the swarm of AI robots yet.
"It's on airplane mode."
"Moonfall" begins when a routine space mission goes awry, with two astronauts, Brian Harper
and Jo Fowler, barely surviving what Brian can only describe as an attack from an unidentified
source.
Jo, having been unconscious, assumes the assault was some kind of solar flare.
The disagreement leaves the colleagues and friends estranged, with Brian becoming a washed
up deadbeat to his only son, Sonny, while Jo moves up the NASA ladder.
Ten years later, a conspiracy theorist named K.C.
discovers that the moon has been knocked off its orbital path and is on a collision course
with Earth.
He winds up teaming with the two former friends to figure out how to correct the moon's course,
but they both balk at his theory that the moon isn't what it seems.
They begin to grow more sympathetic to his crackpot theories when Jo is promoted to head
of NASA and given clearance to see the original footage from her and Brian's botched mission.
There, she meets a mysterious spook named Holdenfield who explains he's been responsible
for covering up the truth about the moon since Earth's earliest expeditions.
Jo starts to come around to the craziness when she witnesses, with her own eyes, the
phenomenon that Brian tried to get her to believe: a heart-stopping swarm of black nano-machines.
She surmises that whatever this entity is, its presence is what set the moon out of alignment.
If Earth is to be saved, it needs to be dealt with.
But even though NASA's top brass has been aware of the moon not being what it seemed
for decades, they don't know its true nature.
All they know is that whatever it is, it's more advanced than humanity can handle.
Initially, in response to the moon threat, Jo had scrambled an emergency mission with
the help of some European allies.
The intent of the mission was to see what's inside the 26-kilometer deep crater on the
moon that the black swarm had come out of.
But that mission killed everyone involved, so Plan B has to be a little more drastic.
With no faith or support from the rest of the government, and very little resources
at their disposal, Jo has to bring in Brian, who encountered the entity before, and K.C.,
whose status as a "megastructurist" might prove useful – especially now that she knows
most of the accepted knowledge surrounding the moon is now completely useless.
The new plan is to get a lander onto the moon's surface equipped with a super-powerful EMP
the military had been developing for years to deal with NASA's secret moon problem.
The project had been abandoned as too costly, but one working prototype still exists, which
is what ends up being used in an attempt to destroy the black swarm.
As the moon's gravitational pull and exponential velocity increases, the plan starts to look
impossible to pull off.
The one usable rocket loses one of its engines.
The moon itself begins to fall apart as it gets closer to Earth's atmosphere, sending
debris all across the landscape.
But the gravity tsunami that the moon brings with it proves to be useful in getting a rocket
out of orbit, even without the engine thrust necessary to get the rocket to properly launch.
Unfortunately, this scientific revelation comes after everyone working for NASA has
been released to go home and find shelter with their loved ones, leaving the film's
three leads to embark on this insane mission alone.
With the original plan B already looking like a failure, the military industrial complex
gets hard at work on a much more logical solution to this absurd problem: they're going to nuke
the moon.
This adds extra pressure onto Jo and Brian's mission, as they're stranded out in space,
unsure of whether their cowboy maneuvers will even work — and if they do, they have no
way to communicate with the military to stop them from nuking the moon to smithereens.
But Jo does have one contact on the inside, as her ex-husband Doug is with the Joint Chiefs
in the Colorado doomsday bunker Jo was supposed to bring their son to.
Compared to Jo and Brian, Doug is a straightforward guy who isn't exactly thrilled at the "nuke
the moon" plan, but in the absence of better, more concrete plans, sees it as humanity's
only chance to keep from having the moon hitting everyone's eyes like a big pizza pie.
If only he had some way to know that his ex-wife's long shot plan of getting a rocket into space
actually worked...
Luckily, Brian's son Sonny, alongside Jo and Doug's young son, saw the rocket take off.
They've been driving to the doomsday bunker themselves, running into all manner of peril.
But Jo's son has a satellite phone with a direct line to his dad, so they're able to
notify Doug that the mission is active.
If he pulls the trigger on launching all those nukes, he'll also be pulling the trigger on
dooming his son to grow up without a mother.
This leads to a standoff between Doug and every other authority figure in the bunker
right at the moment they're meant to begin the launch sequence to initiate a nuclear
onslaught on the moon.
It's a crazy bit of drama, because Doug doesn't understand Jo's plan, how it's going, or if
it's even feasible.
All he knows is that Jo has never let him down before.
But – the plan is essentially screwed.
Brian's initial idea is to lure the black swarm out by exploiting its reaction to electricity
before destroying it with the EMP, but it sees through their ruse.
When it tries to destroy their ship, they realize it's not solely electricity that the
swarm responds to, but rather organic matter alongside machinery.
With no other recourse, Brian pilots the lander into the deep crater the swarm has retreated
into, and that's where the real fun begins.
"You know, we are just inside the moon."
"That might be the greatest sentence anyone's ever said."
The inside of the moon is, as K.C. had theorized, a megastructure: an enormous vessel crafted
by advanced alien life.
He says some in his community believe that all megastructures are arks, but what they
discover next proves he's only half right.
As the swarm tries to destroy them, there is another opposing force within the moon's
core, one that takes over the controls of the ship and guides them to safety on the
other side of a blast door — an area, they discover, that has air.
When K.C. and Jo wake from the crash, they discover Brian is missing and go exploring
this newfound space.
But Brian is already communing with an entity that possesses all the answers.
It speaks to him in the guise of his son, but it's the operating system for the supermachine
that is the moon.
It is a megastructure, but it wasn't created by aliens.
It was made by humans.
As told to Brian, the moon is an ark created by a form of the human race that was far more
advanced than ourselves.
They had created a utopian society and proliferated throughout the cosmos.
But one day, the artificial intelligence they had created to help run this society grew
sentient, turned on them, and vowed to destroy all of humanity.
They created moons to find suitable places to build new planets to be seeded with human
life.
Our Earth is the only successful settlement, created from the moon and seeded with human
DNA.
The moon orbits the Earth to protect it should the AI swarm ever find it, as it has now.
The operating system tries to understand why Brian is so willing to risk his life to save
the rest of the planet, and his answer — about love for his own son and for his race — lets
the moon know he is ready to get back into the game and stop the AI.
It supercharges their ship, gives Brian what can only be described as temporary superpowers,
and sets them out to get into a dogfight at the moon's core with a malevolent swarm of
human-hating nano-machines.
The ensuing laser battle culminates in the realization that one of them is going to have
to stay behind in the lander to detonate the EMP and put a stop to the swarm for good.
Brian has decided to sacrifice himself, but someone else has other plans.
K.C., a man who has spent his whole life having his scientific beliefs treated like a joke,
who no one ever thought would amount to anything, has finally gotten to see space — and see
his research and life's work validated.
K.C.
has, in the last few days of the film's narrative, lived more of an exciting life than he previously
had in all his prior years combined.
That's why he can't let Brian or Jo stay behind when they have children on Earth that need
them.
Brian must go back now as the main conduit to the moon's deep reservoir of knowledge
regarding humanity's secret history.
K.C. is going to stay behind and culminate the unlikely journey he embarked upon at the
film's introduction.
He sacrifices himself, defeating the swarm and making it possible for Brian and Jo to
reunite with their families on Earth.
His sacrifice doesn't seem to be permanent.
As the film closes, K.C.
re-materializes in the same space Brian learned about the moon's true origins.
Only now the operating system presents itself as K.C.'s mother, and his cat Fuzz Aldrin.
It explains that his consciousness has been uploaded into the moon's supercomputer and
that his work is far from over.
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