Never Let Go

  Never Let Go is a solid post-apocalyptic horror film from the very reliable French genre craftsman Alexandre Aja. It looked a little too similar to any number of recent offerings, but thankfully it's got a little more on its mind than trying to be the next A Quiet Place.

 Momma (Halle Berry - that's her character's name in the credits) lives alone with her two children at a cabin in the woods. She insists the world outside has been taken over by an inchoate, shape-shifting, mind-affecting Evil, and that. The three of them are the last human beings on earth, and the Evil hungers for them.

 Whether this is a highly allegorical delusion or not is basically fuels the whole movie. Her sons - Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins), the eldest, is dutiful and responsible, while Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) is a little more rambunctious and questioning of her mother's... well, patently batshit insane worldview. Then again, this is a horror movie.

 The invading Evil manifests in ghosts that only Momma can see, taking on the shape of ghosts from her past: her mom, her husband (whom, we soon learn, she both killed when she discovered they had been taken over by The Evil). I like that it's made explicit that they won't show themselves to her children to drive a wedge of incredulity between them. In any case, a single touch from The Evil is all that's needed for it to be able to possess you thoroughly. 

 The only protection is the house itself, which The Evil can't breach. What's more, this protection can be extended via ropes tied to a post in the attic; As long as Momma and the children are tethered to them, The Evil can't touch them as they go outside to hunt and forage for food. Momma's developed a sort of quasi-religious series of rituals centered around the house, an easy analog for traditionalism and belief.

 It all fits in very nicely with the recent streak of horror movies that have rules that seem like something straight out of children's games.

 After a particularly brutal winter (which drains the family food reserves in a rather lovely montage), tensions come to a head between Momma and Nolan. There's a pretty fun development that sends the third act in a slightly different direction than I expected, but all in all it's a really simple survival-focused story with a possibly supernatural, blatantly allegorical edge.

 As a genre film, it's a bit of a mixed bag. I lean positive, because it's got some excellent, very tense scenes, a commendable sense of cruelty, and a solid throughline. It's full of little vignettes like an anecdote Momma tells about finding a wounded hiker and forcing herself to watch as she slowly died as a sort of test of faith (everyone but her family is possessed in her worldview); Fucking hell that's grim. But... I'd be lying if I didn't say I found the script (by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby) frustrating.
 Its ideas seem are fairly derivative, and the refusal to commit to any given interpretation (depending on how reliable you deem the camera's point of view to be) is not very satisfying; Ambiguity needs to give us a lot more to chew on to not feel like a cop out - and however you chose to interpret the events here, there's simply not a lot to either choice. That one of the final shots of the film is yet another flip-flop kind of soured me on it (as always, movies that end on a bum note have it harder than worse films that manage to stick the landing).
 Also funny: The Evil is heavily snake-people-inspired. Dear reader, snake people! David Icke was right all along!

 But for all its flaws, I do think most of the movie is good. Slow, but enthralling. Aja obviously knows his way around an intense horror scene, and his unfussy but stately direction (which includes novelistic chapter headings) adds a lot to the proceeds. Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, meanwhile, gives the moss-shrouded British Columbia woods a downbeat, sometimes otherworldly feel, and the effects are decent. The acting is a highlight: Halle Berry is fierce and, to be honest, fucking scary in a sort of Carrie's mom deluded fundamentalist way, and the two kids - who are convincingly, heartbreakingly tiny - are terrific; The film gets an enormous, if exploitative jolt of energy by putting them up against starvation, Momma's 'teachings' and more metaphysical dangers.

 Both critics and audiences were less than kind, and the film remains a box-office bomb with a slightly tepid reputation. I get it, I really do. This isn't one of those cases where I feel the need to champion a maligned masterpiece or anything like that. Apparently they already had a prequel and a sequel developed in the works, and that's the sort of empire building I really can't get behind.
 Flawed as it is, though, it's still a cool little survival story with some good, jagged horror shrapnel deeply embedded on its lean meat.

Moonfall

  In director Roland Emmerich's new disasterpiece Moonfall, the moon comes so close to the earth that not only does it reach the stratosphere, it shears off a peak in the Rockies.

 Its gravity pulls off the tip of the Chrysler building and deposits it on the other side of the country (mostly intact, of course, so you can recognize it).

 Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached peak Emmerich; he's going to really struggle to top himself.

 I'm struggling to find words to express just how dumb this movie is. Calling it an insult to your intelligence is an insult to insults to your intelligence.

 But it all comes to expectations in the end; It doesn't make sense to go watch the latest from one of the brains behind 2012 and Independence Day expecting anything but undiluted idiocy.

 I hadn't seen anything of his in more than a decade, but after watching Troll, which is pretty much a (very) slightly less dumb, Finnish version of a Roland Emmerich opus, I got curious what the man himself was up to. Spoilers: I didn't hate it!

 Things start out quietly enough: on a routine space shuttle mission, three astronauts run into an sentient inkblot of ferrofluid-like matter, which proceeds to attack them, blasting their electronics and leaving them stranded in the ionosphere. The astronauts are played by Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, and an unknown black actor- guess one which one dies? In any case, Berry is left unconscious and Wilson heroically brings the shuttle back to earth only with manual controls.

 You'd think he'd arrive to a hero's welcome, but in the Emmerichverse organizations and institutions are evil and corrupt, their only raison d'etre to make things harder for the heroic individuals who actually get shit done- so the NASA turns on him and makes him a scapegoat.

 Ten years or so later Brian (Wilson's character) is almost destitute and estranged from his wife and son, which sets up the overtly familiar (pun not intended) and deeply deeply shitty drama that will ensue. We're also introduced to KC, a conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) who, just like real-life conspiracy nuts, is a loveable, cuddly teddy bear of an Englishman - he even talks like a kid's show presenter!
 KC's pet project is Dyson Spheres and other superstructures, which seems like a weird and very wholesome subject for a conspiracy theorist these days, but there you go. He's been gathering data and has discovered that the moon is going off its orbit, setting it on a collision course with earth.

 (Trigger warning - besides all the enabling of conspiracy-mindset bullshit , which of course turns out to be 100% correct, there are a couple of instances of Elon Musk being mentioned in near-orgasmic tones; SpaceX has a small part in saving the earth.)

 The NASA has also noticed the moon's inconstancy, but they're trying to cover things up because that's what institutions do, right? they quickly put together a mission to the moon to see what's up, and what's up is that the moon has developed a huge hole. When probed, the black ferrofluid blob (which, by the way, is a very unimaginative shorthand for nanobots) comes out and kills everyone.

 At the thirty minute mark the movie finally kicks into gear when a giant wave hits LA. That's... actually pretty efficient timekeeping for this sort of  film! From there the movie starts splicing its raison d'etre (splosions and buildings breaking) with its inane exposition and drama.
 Things end up with another space mission with our three intrepid protagonists going to the moon and into it. Because, you see it was actually hollow, a Dyson sphere all along! Complete with a captive white dwarf star to power it! KC was right! (Never mind that the smallest known white dwarf is roughly the size of the moon; that's actually one of this movie's lesser liberties with basic science and physics)

 Meanwhile there's a B-story where Brian's son takes an overland trek amidst the moonpocalypse as he escorts Halle Berry's character's son (ugh!) to get to an underground shelter in Colorado; incredibly stupid things keep happening all around them, so at least everything is kept consistent.

 You have to shut off your brain at one point, not just to enjoy this, but to survive it; plausibility just has never, ever been even a minor concern for Emmerich, nor is letting minor details like basic physics get in the way of whatever hare-brain scene he's conceived. This is, if I haven't made myself clear by now, a really fucking dumb movie. However, the mostly CGI mayhem can sometimes be beautiful, as shots of the moon flying close to the earth often are here, and the actual explanation for the lunatic goings-on is an unexpectedly ambitious (if still pretty dumb) slice of sci-fi.

 I expected a piece of shit, in other words, and got one, but... it's a fun piece of shit. It helps that it wasn't as disaster-porny as it looked, there are some other elements to it. Aside from the first half hour and a couple of dead spots later the pacing runs at a clip; this doesn't do wonders for the storytelling, but since the movie is what it is, that's no loss; at least things keep moving.
Low expectations were fully met. Huzzah, hurrah, etcetera!