[imagesource: Reiner Bajo]

If you have the likes of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow on your CV, and you sign up to direct a disaster movie, big things are expected of you.

No pressure, Roland Emmerich.

We briefly touched on Moonfall a few months back, when a teaser trailer was released.

Now we have a more informative look at the film starring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, Michael Pena, John Bradley, and Donald Sutherland.

The basics, via Mashable:

…the 1969 moon landing didn’t go quite according to plan. The astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission found something unexpected up there, something they kept hidden from the public.

52 years later, some potentially alien shenanigans have resulted in the moon being put on a collision course with Earth. The only person who can stop it is astronaut and NASA executive Jo Fowler (Berry), who teams up with astronaut Brian Harper (Wilson), and conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (Bradley).

It used to be a great deal easier to chuckle at conspiracy theorists.

Now they walk among us.

Anyway, let’s check out the new trailer:

Yes, the year’s most hotly anticipated movie is only due for release on February 4 next year.

We all know why so many movie releases have been delayed. Let’s not go there.

Here’s a fun fact – Emmerich based Independence Day on conspiracy theories around Area 51.

Moonfall is also based on a conspiracy theory, although one that’s a touch more obscure.

This from Vanity Fair:

About seven years ago, Emmerich stumbled upon something known as the Hollow Moon theory, a notion that the celestial body orbiting our planet and illuminating the night sky either A) is not a natural occurrence, or B) has a vast and secret interior life….

“I immediately realized, oh, my God, this could very well be one of these conspiracies where you can have something really traumatic happen, meaning the moon is getting out of orbit and falling on Earth. But at the same time, you learn that the moon is not what you think it is. It’s always a cool way to get into a movie,” Emmerich says.

The theory has been around a while and gained momentum after NASA’s Apollo program recorded a series of quakes on the moon in the 1970s.

Emmerich started by reading the 2005 book Who Built the Moon?, which puts forward the idea that time-travelling earthlings built it “as a means of tracking the evolution of life without disrupting its course”.

How silly. What next, a vaccine that changes your DNA and makes you magnetic?

[sources:mashable&vanityfair]