‘Moon 44’ (1990) Review

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Over on Kung Pew Video, I’ve been revisiting the direct-to-video relics that raised us. This week: Roland Emmerich’s Moon 44.

I’ve got a thing for sweaty, grimy, claustrophobic movies about greedy corporations in space. Whether it’s Outland, the Alien franchise, or Soldier, something about these movies just fires my imagination.

It probably goes back to my childhood fascination with strange new worlds. As a kid, I recreated those worlds with toys and a healthy dose of imagination. Whether it was Star Wars, Transformers, He-Man–or some mix of them all. And I think that’s why I appreciate the craft that goes into creating the worlds these stories are set in. From the miniatures and matte paintings to the creative props and practical sets–these filmmakers took that same love of play and imagination and built worlds that felt tangible and real. Worlds that felt like you could step into. 

And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the movies that ground those strange worlds in the real and the familiar. Worlds where machinery breaks. People still have crappy jobs. And the giant corporations are still trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their employees.

Moon 44 creates that kind of world, but without the resources or reputation of James Cameron’s Aliens and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Those movies had millions of dollars and sprawling studio backlots to work with. Roland Emmerich had about $2.5 million dollars and his dad’s furniture warehouse.

And somehow, Moon 44 still looks as real as LV-426 or Con-Am 27.

Before He Blew Up the World

Before Roland Emmerich made it big with hits like Stargate and Independence Day (both of which I saw in the theater), he already had the instincts of a blockbuster director.

Moon 44 takes place in the distant year…2038. And I just gotta digress for a sec here, because watching all of these old sci-fi movies set in the quote future gives me whiplash sometimes. Most of these movies are set in years that have either already passed or are quickly approaching. Some of them imagine way weirder futures than the one we are living in, and some didn’t even come close. 2038 isn’t really that far off, but who knows what could happen in a decade and change. 

But anyway. Moon 44’s version of 2038 imagines man has fully conquered the stars and wouldn’t you know it: greedy, rival corporations have spread throughout the galaxy and are now fighting over its dwindling resources. 

Moon 44 is one of the last functioning outposts the Galactic Mining Corporation has. If it falls, the company is kaput. So some military general cooks up a scheme to defend the place with convicts and teenage hackers before the fit hits the shan.

The Usual Suspects

Michael Paré plays our hero Felix Stone, a corporate internal-affairs agent sent to figure out who’s boosting the company’s expensive mining shuttles. 

I’ve liked Paré since his Eddie and the Cruisers days, and he plays a convincing enough straight-laced tough guy here. But just to juice his character up a bit, the writers decided to make Stone a man of letters. The dude carries the Western Canon around with him in his duffel bag, and though the writers never really do anything satisfying with that, it makes him just a bit more unique than the stereotypical meathead hero character we often get in these types of movies. 

Brian Thompson plays one of the convict pilots, who is basically here to act as a foil to Pare’s good guy Stone. Malcolm McDowell sneers a lot as Moon 44’s corpo-military commander, while Leon Rippy chews the absolute shit out of the scenery as his hard-assed sergeant and useful idiot. These guys were like required casting in genre movies in the late 80s and ’90s. All they needed was Sven Ole-Thoreson to round out the list of usual suspects, but he was probably busy playing a henchman in a half dozen other movies that year. 

Outside of the tough guys and heavies, Dean Devlin brings some charisma to the movie as Stone’s navigator and Stephen Geoffreys from the original Fright Night plays the same weirdo he seems to play in every movie. Roscoe Lee Browne (who does the voice for Box in Logan’s Run) conjures a greedy, mustache-twirling corporate j-hole who is only too happy to send men to their deaths to keep the company’s profits flowing. He’s basically the Peter Boyle character from Outland here. Just played a bit slicker and with more class. 

Lisa Eichhorn is good with what she’s given, but unfortunately, she isn’t given much. She won a best actress award for Cutter’s Way with Jeff Bridges. By the way, if you haven’t seen that, I recommend it. Moon 44 is mostly a sweaty, testosterone-filled affair, and I get the impression Eichorn’s character was written in to soften things up a bit. Which is fine, but the movie doesn’t really seem to know what to do with her. 

So anyway that’s your cast. 

Moon 44 is the Star

But, honestly, the real star here is the world Emmerich and his crew built for Moon 44.

The sets are grimy and cramped with steam pouring out of metal grates in just about every shot. The world of Moon 44 is industrial, dark, sweaty, and man is it atmospheric. Which is helped along by Joel Goldsmith’s tense and sometimes soaring score. There’s a little of Vangelis’s Blade Runner and hints of Alan Silvestri’s Predator score here, but it never feels like a rip off. And it all serves the movie’s tone pretty well.

Then there’s the exterior shots of Moon 44. Which are incredible. 

The miniatures, the lighting–the dark, misty, alien landscape–all combine to create something that feels tangible. Tactile. And this isn’t one of those cases where it looks good for the budget it had. The practical sets and effects in this are legitimately good. Better than good. I think the world Emmerich and company created fits in perfectly with the worlds we were introduced to in Alien, Outland, and even Blade Runner.

Visual Shorthand

In fact, there are a few scenes where Rosco Lee Browne meets with the Galactic Mining Corporation’s executives at their headquarters that feel ripped straight from the Ridley Scott classic cyberpunk. 

These scenes were filmed in the famous Frank Lloyd Wright Ennis house in Los Angeles. Blade Runner fans will recognize the weird-shaped concrete blocks that the walls are made out of from Rick Deckard’s apartment in the movie. But the really weird thing is, though scenes for Blade Runner were shot at the Ennis House, also sometimes called the Mayan House, Deckard’s apartment was actually shot on a soundstage, and the tiles on his wall were plastic recreations made from molds taken from the Ennis House. 

And that may sound like kind of a rip off, but I don’t think Moon 44 is trying to hide its inspirations. If anything, I think Moon 44 wants us to know what it’s borrowing from. It’s kind of like a visual shorthand. So much so, that most of the movie looks like it could have been shot on reused sets from Aliens or Outland. Which is really kind of a compliment when you think about the fact that Moon 44 is a West German production. No Hollywood money, no big Hollywood names. And a whole, believable alien world created from scratch in Emmerich’s dad’s furniture warehouse. 

But the movie’s not just ripping off other movie’s aesthetics. The big space ship we see here and there in establishing shots is also original and looks great. It’s a great design and it’s a great-looking model. The helicopter-like defense vehicles the convicts fly throughout the movie are also original and look great even if they never quite feel as solid as they should. But that’s one of the only marks against this film in the production design department, and I’d take these little model sci-fi helicopters over computer-generated vehicles any day of the week. At least they look like a real thing you can reach out and touch.

The Weak Link

Unfortunately, the relationship between pilot and navigator, that the movie’s premise sort of hangs on, is pretty wishy washy. 

The movie makes it clear early on that the beefy convicts and nerdy computer hackers have to cooperate–or the convicts will die and Moon 44 will be overrun. But it never clearly explains how the relationship works or why the cons need the navigators. During one scene, a navigator who has been…let’s say violated…by one of the cons takes revenge on him by ramping up his speed until he crashes into a cliff face. But if the navigator controls the vehicle’s speed, what exactly is the pilot doing?

It just feels like some crap the writers came up with because the plot demanded it. 

And that hits on Moon 44’s biggest flaw: the plot never really gels together as well as the world surrounding it.

The movie tries to build tension in a way similar to how Outland does it, but Outland gave us a countdown clock and a clear sense of impending doom. We know time is running out, and we know that when it does, Connery is gonna have to gut it out on his own. Or die. 

A Faceless Threat

In Moon 44, we occasionally see a large ship floating menacingly through space, but we never see who is on board and it’s never really clear that this ship is the threat the movie is leading up to. The threat needed to feel imminent way earlier and the men who have been duped into defending Moon 44 needed to understand that they were basically marooned by the higher-ups and left to die. 

Instead, that realization doesn’t come until the end,, and when the bad guys attack, which amount to faceless corporate drones, the whole thing feels like kind of a nothing burger.

In Outland, the stakes are obvious and the threat is clear. Sadly, that is not the case with Moon 44.

Moon 44 is a Forgotten Gem

But despite its flaws, I had a lot of fun with it. 

If anything, I wish there were more movies like it. I’d give a million Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets for a handful more of these sweaty, macho space mining movies from the 80s and 90s.  

Is it a perfect movie? Nah. 

But it is an early example of the kind of qualities that would eventually make Roland Emmerich one of Hollywood’s biggest blockbuster directors: an enormous sense of scale and the technical ingenuity to bring it all to the screen. He may not have had blockbuster money when he made Moon 44, but he managed to produce a movie that visually stands up there with some of the best examples of the genre to come out of that era. 

And that is what makes Moon 44 exactly the kind of forgotten video-store-era gem Kung Pew Video exists to dig up and shine a light on.

I’ll take sweaty muscle-bound dudes doing sweaty muscle-bound crap, miniature spaceships, corporate a-holes, and copious amounts of steam over the glossy, safe, CGI-rendered crap Hollywood produces today.  

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Well, that’s gonna do it for this Kung Pew Video review. Have you seen Moon 44? What did you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Remember to head over to YouTube, kick and subscribe, and karate chop that like button. I post reviews on Thursdays at 10am central. Thanks for watching.