Irwin Allen
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Certainly, there's nothing here to match General Richard Widmark's immortal line in The Swarm -- "Houston on fire.
Emmerich is more of a kindred spirit to the late schlockmeister producer Irwin Allen ("The Swarm," "The Poseidon Adventure") than he is to Michael Moore, and "Day" is far more effective as a guilty-pleasure popcorn extravaganza than as any kind of a serious political statement.
In fact, Soderbergh has cited the Allen-produced The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) as inspiratuons, though the Allen-directed The Swarm(1978) may be closer than anything else—only with a greater degree of governing intelligence and considerably more polish.
2012 (2009)
Directed by Roland Emmerich
influenced by Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), The Swarm (1978)
Music Themes
“Titanic,” “Earthquake,” “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” “The Hurricane” — they’re all here and more, complete with Adam Lambert musically channeling Maureen McGovern (“The Poseidon Adventure”) as he warbles over the closing credits.
Now, it's no The Swarm , for few movies indeed are; but it still has a kind of crap magic to 2012 that makes it far more enjoyable, even with a bloated length, than something as inert as Independence Day.
When Machine components swirl en masse, we're reminded of The Swarm, and a distracting Reeves eye mishap suggests Lasik gone terribly wrong — or maybe he's auditioning for Oedipus Rex.
With an embarrassing, overwrought performance by the dependably creeped-out Joaquin Phoenix that has to be the most hysterically misguided overacting since Dennis Hopper played Napoleon and Harpo Marx played Sir Isaac Newton in The Story of Mankind, I’m tempted to call it the worst thing I have seen this year, but there are two more coming up—Terrence Malick’s dystopic To the Wonder and a diabolically demented time-travel farce called Cloud Atlas—that are even worse.
In Moonfall, he kind of does both, adopting tropes largely invented by ‘70s disaster king, Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm, The Towering Inferno) and giving them a modern, larger than life update.
And while I understand that such a thing would have gone over the heads of nearly every audience member, how could it be possible that a film could conceive of a scene involving Michael Caine riding a giant bee through the sky and not work in at least one reference to "The Swarm," the infamous killer bee disaster movie he did for Irwin Allen which is now only the second-worst bee-related film in his oeuvre.
"Journey 2: The Mysterious Island" is surely the silliest outing for Caine since he swatted rampaging killer bees in the 1978 disaster flick "The Swarm."
Caine hit a career low fleeing from killer bees in 1978's The Swarm, but here he leaps on to the back of giant buzzing creatures for one of this movie's more enjoyable set pieces.
Of them, none is wasted so thoroughly as Michael Caine as one of the bad guys--not only is this arguably the laziest performance that he has half-delivered since the days when he was coasting through easy paychecks like "The Swarm" and "Jaws IV" but his very presence serves as a sad reminder that he once appeared in one of the very best movies about magicians ever made--"The Prestige"--and therefore what a movie of this type could be when put in the right hands.