As you may have guessed, there will be massive spoilers for Moonfall from start to finish.
If you’ve had the pleasure of catching Roland Emmerich’s latest big budget attack on our planet, you may have been left wondering what the hell went down in the third act, once our group of ragtag heroes finally made it to the Moon in an effort to prevent a malevolent intergalactic artificial intelligence from destroying all living creatures.
Patrick Wilson’s Brian Harper might have been the one to act as the audience surrogate for an incredibly lengthy and convoluted sequence of flashbacks that tried their best to turn the nonsensical narrative soup into something even a little more coherent, but it was John Bradley’s K.C. Houseman who made the ultimate sacrifice play.
Naturally, the megastructurist and conspiracy theorist stayed behind to defeat the evil alien force, only to be reborn as a sentient computer program hardwired into the circuitry of the Moon itself. If that sounds stupid, it’s because it is, but the actor did his best to try and make sense of it in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“It was a complete left turn for me. I was totally blindsided by it in a way that I hope the audience will be as well. Because all the way through, Patrick was set up to be the hero. Patrick looks like a hero. He acts like a hero. It’d be a satisfying narrative arc for his character – who is plagued by self-doubt and going through a rough patch – to have that redemptive heroic sacrifice at the end. That the moment goes to K.C. instead, it almost comes out of nowhere.
But when I thought about it leading up to doing the final goodbye scene with Patrick, it made more and more sense. K.C. was completely alone. He had no family, no friends. His dad died, his mom had dementia and didn’t recognize him, and was fixated with space. There’s nothing left for him to come back to. He finally got to space and his life was never going to get any better than that. Also, he knows what it’s like to grow up missing a parent, and he didn’t want Brian’s son to go through the same pain he went through. So the seeds were all planted.
Roland left the door open to a sequel, so we’ll have to see if that happens, but my theory is the moon isn’t the full extent of this. Maybe the moon is a part of a grand plan and whatever is in charge of the moon and that technology might have infested the entire solar system, the entire universe. So K.C. may be called into action for a couple more missions on a much grander scale.”
Emmerich previously told THR he planned on filming Moonfall 2 and 3 back-to-back, with a big cliffhanger in between the films, should the first one be a big success. Bradley is ready, should he be called into action again.
Says the actor: “Moonfall is an ambitious movie. But if Roland goes down the direction that he wants to, the second the third movie maybe even more batshit crazy than the first.”
Based on the most recent box office numbers, Emmerich’s sequel-baiting ending looks to be all for naught, and Moonfall seems likely to mark the latest blockbuster to end on a note designed to hype further installments that won’t actually happen.