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“Film a pretend moon landing!”

The conspiracy theorists favor the idea that director Stanley Kubrick filmed the moon landing following the far-reaching vision that he displayed with 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. Kubrick showed a unified vision for the space epic, which may or may not have looked a little better than what the actual mission into space looked like.

Moonwalkers, a film that uses the idea that the CIA was looking to employ Kubrick to fake the moon landing, could use some unity in terms of its vision. While playing a little bit with the color of the famed director’s films, on top of some exploitation-esque action sequences and over-the-top performances from a few of its stars, the film struggles to find any sort of identity and makes about as much sense as the theories about Kubrick did.

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The film follows Jonny (Rupert Grint), a down on his luck music manager, who is looking for that one big score to show that he is more than a sham for his talent. He happens upon a CIA agent named Kidman (played by Ron Perlman), who is sent to London to find Stanley Kubrick and offer a king’s ransom to stage a moon landing in the occasion the real one doesn’t work.

Kidman is a Vietnam veteran, which is shown through completely unnecessary and random “ghosts” that appear in his mind covered in gruesome injuries. We really aren’t shown why Kidman suffers from these visions or whether they are important to any aspect of the film other than telling a minor detail of the agent’s past, but this invasion of unnecessary plot points becomes a reoccurring theme.

Director Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, who is directing his first feature film, doesn’t seem certain as to what kind of film he wants to make. Draped in 70s garb, Moonwalkers shifts from satire to exploitative action piece to conspiracy thriller and finally, mind-tripping drug-induced smorgasbord. The shifts in tone creates an uneasy, confused feeling that makes you want to ask more questions than the film knows how to answer.

Within this convulsion is a somewhat entertaining film. Perlman does his best impression of his famed character, Hellboy, without having to put on the prosthetics. The sequences filled with carnage at least give the film some life — even if they don’t exactly make sense. With limbs and blood flying around like in one of The Raid films, the action is extreme, in your face, and painfully silly.

But, Moonwalkers wants to be something. It is too bad that it just plays like a silly and confused child trying to discover what they want to do with the day. Grint’s character is stereotypical to a tee, but he plays it with sincerity and the awkward motivation that made him a relative household name from the Harry Potter franchise.

The biggest flaw of the film lies in its fever-dream aesthetic that shows an amateur director working. It isn’t necessarily the fault of Bardou-Jacquet, who pulls off some of the scenes, but his lack of experience is blatantly obvious as we shift between different tones and visions. He has affection for Kubrick, using the director’s sense of color to attempt allowing the 2001 filmmaker to make his mark in a film where his name bares the key to the plot.

But, in the end, the flaws outweigh the positives and the almost superhero ability of Perlman’s character doesn’t make sense in the long term. Moonwalkers doesn’t know if it is funny, cool, action-packed, or cocky and that is a major problem. The story is silly, but the movie doesn’t embrace that, instead falling into a more nonsense slot than even the conspiracy theorist could cook up.

5/10

 

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Zach Dennis is a contributor for Cut Print Film and co-host of The News Reel Podcast.

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