Director Emmerich, of the awful "Independence Day," the underrated "Godzilla," and the dull "The Patriot," had to start somewhere. Felix Stone (Michael Pare) is an agent for a multi galaxial conglomerate who must investigate the titular moon to find out why mining shuttles are disappearing and aliens keep attacking it. He is shipped to the moon as part of a bunch of prisoners who have volunteered to fly fighters against any attack. He meets up with navigator Tyler (Dean Devlin), a whistle blower who will help Stone. First, we must deal with a subplot involving prisoners versus navigators- navigators are all skinny and hairless and easily picked on by the manly steroid-ish looking prisoners, led by O'Neal (Brian Thompson). Conflict resolved, Stone weeds out bad guy Lee (Malcolm McDowell), and fights a wave of robot aliens who want the planet. Characters die, etc.
Devlin turns in an outstanding performance. He is very good, despite some silly lines and scenes. Lisa Eichhorn is awful as the commander of the fighter base, she reads her lines as if seeing them for the first time, and in one crucial scene, as she verbally dresses down the prisoners, her voice cracks. This was written for a much stronger actress. The set design is clicheed but excellent. There is no point to the dark steam emitting from mysterious vents in outer space, but this one is very good. The fighter flying effects leave something to be desired. Emmerich tries to hide the cheap looking models by drenching them with a smoke machine, but they still look like toys on fishing line. What is with Emmerich and canyon flying? All the action takes place in a maze of canyons, "Independence Day" also had a battle in a canyon, and even "Godzilla" could consider the streets of Manhattan as looking like cement canyons. The special effects are not the showcase here as they are in other Emmerich films, so he decides to put in the very weak subplot of the buff prisoners knocking around the nerdy navigators. We know MacDowell is the villain (with no motive), so we must suffer through the kind of storylines normally seen on alphabet soup network cop shows, before an unconvincing final battle that just shows Emmerich wanted more money than he got in his budget. "Moon 44" is not a bad film, and it is not a good film, it is completely and blatantly average. I will slightly recommend it, but only to diehard sci-fi fans.
