For some reason this trailer totally slipped under my radar when it was released last month: The trailer for Roland Emmerich’s latest doom porn extravaganza —MOONFALL.
While I am not a particularly big fan of Emmerich’s work –the man will not be content until he manages to depict the destruction of EVERY famous monument and building in the world– I still give him big kudos for having the temerity of continuously taking inspiration from the wildest, most provocative streams in the paranormal river. He may be single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of the ancient aliens theory with Stargate (1994), and Independence Day (1996) –arguably his most successful film– introduced both Roswell and Area 51 into modern pop culture.
With MOONFALL Emmerich seems to have dusted off two main ideas for his plot:
The Hollow Moon
This idea began to gestate after the Apollo 12 mission released their orbiter under the close scrutiny of the seismometers left by both astronauts Conrad and Bean, as well as their predecessors Armstrong and Aldrin. NASA scientists were interested in learning more about the composition and inner structure of the Moon, but they were were surprised when they discovered that after the orbiter’s impact on the lunar surface, the instruments kept registering vibrations for over 55 minutes, which has been hence sensationalized with phrases such as “the Moon rang like a bell.”
This prompted a couple of soviet scientists –who were always prone to bombastic claims– to conclude that our Moon was not a naturally-occurring satellite to our planet, but was in fact some sort of hollowed-out planetoid used by some highly advanced civilization to safely traverse long interplanetary distances, until the rocky spaceship was steered into a circular orbit around Earth.
Though wildly speculative, the idea is not without its merit since a thick layer of rock would prove an ideal shield against the deadly cosmic rays which make man-made space travel so hazardous, and even to this day there are those who propose using small asteroids as spacecraft —Rendezvous with Rama anyone?
The World Ice Doctrine of Hanns Hörbiger
This controversial subject is something I explored in an article I wrote for Mysterious Universe back in 2018. Hörbiger was an Austrian-born engineer and pseudoscientist who attained a lot of popularity and influence under Hitler’s 3rd Reich –when a lot of crazy-ass ideas were popularized under the racist umbrella of ‘Aryan supremacy’. In the case of Hörbiger, he developed a rather complicated cosmology which completely eschewed all previous astronomical consensus, and posited that the entire history of the Cosmos was nothing but the eternal struggle between Fire and Ice. All the planets, according to him, are nothing but chunks of cosmic ice created after the primordial sun (which was millions of times bigger than our current star) collided with a giant frozen planet. The Milky Way is actually a giant ring of sparkling ice at 3 times the distance from Neptune, and eventually all the planets will fall back into the Sun, creating another massive explosion which will bring a new cycle of creation.
The Moon we see in the sky, according to Hörbiger, is actually the fourth one which our planet has captured. The three previous ones eventually spiraled down and crashed into the Earth, signaling the rise and fall of previous civilizations and extinct fauna. During their periods in which these ancient moons were closer, goes the doctrine, their gravitational pull gave rise not only to enormous creatures (like dinosaurs) but the mutations caused by cosmic rays also brought the birth of gigantic men with incredible physical and mental faculties; these were the titans mentioned by all the ancient myths, which became the teachers of humanity and the divine Kings of Atlantis and Lemuria.
Though in Hörbiger’s doctrine the ‘falling’ of the Moons took thousands of years –enough time for whole mythic empires to rise and fall– it seems obvious that wouldn’t work with Emmerich’s fast-paced cinematic tempo; his movie The Day After Tomorrow (inspired by Whitley Strieber and Art Bell’s book The Coming Global Superstorm) was wildly criticized for showing an impossibly fast precipitating new Ice Age caused by the collapse of the North Atlantic current –but then again, you should never watch an Emmerich’s blockbuster looking for scientific accuracy, should you?
It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction MOONFALL will get –no doubt the usual debunkers will raise all their alarms for his (probable) use of ‘fascist propaganda’, reminding us that if you dare to pay any attention to the works of people like Graham Hancock that means you’re a closeted white supremacist. In the meantime, let’s just hope the REAL white supremacists allow us to contain the pandemic just enough to make going to the movies safe again –although if you think about it, it would be kind of weird to pay 14 bucks to watch a fictionalized end of the world, when a real one is unfolding right in front of us free of charge.
MOONFALL premieres on February 4, 2022.
