'Moonfall': Could the moon hit Earth? We fact check Roland Emmerich's new disaster movie

At a time when the whole world seems like a disaster movie writ large, here’s some good news: The moon isn’t just going to magically fall out of orbit and kill us all. What if some mysterious force just happened to knock it off course, though? Well, then you’ve got a Roland Emmerich film.

The latest from the “Independence Day” director, “Moonfall” (in theaters Friday) stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson as a pair of NASA astronauts who, with the help of a conspiracy theorist (John Bradley), scramble to save the world when a strange intergalactic “swarm” changes the moon’s trajectory and mankind has three weeks to avert an extinction-level event.

Thankfully, it's a movie and not a real-world happening, because that would not be cool. But for everything from the disasters unfolding on Earth to the film’s go-for-broke lunar mission, Emmerich leaned into actual science as well as conspiracy theories.

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“You cannot make a movie like this without knowing what's the truth,” says the filmmaker, who was inspired by reading a book called “Who Built the Moon?” a decade ago that argued it’s not a natural object. “Whenever I was looking at the moon, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, maybe they're right.’ It's a small chance, but then you think more and more about it and then you say, ‘OK, so if this thing would now fall to Earth, would we realize it's artificial?’ ”

USA TODAY spoke with Emmerich and two experts, former astronaut Mike Massimino and geophysicist/disaster researcher Mika McKinnon (who worked on the film), about what’s fact and what’s fiction in “Moonfall."

It’s true, the moon wouldn’t careen directly at Earth

“Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” let loose asteroids aimed straight at Earth, but as shown in "Moonfall," the lunar body wouldn’t just fall willy-nilly. Instead, the moon would go into an elliptical orbit that would get smaller and smaller before a doomsday moment. In fact, Emmerich’s team used planetary sciences simulators to figure out what it would accurately look like.

“As the moon gets closer, its orbit gets faster and faster because the angular momentum changes just like with a figure skater – arms out, arms in – to change the speed of their spin,” McKinnon says. “All that is very real science.”

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The movie revolves around a cover-up based on conspiracies around the 1969 moon landing

The famous mission led to a number of infamous theories that the film borrows, from the idea of a “hollow moon” to some people’s belief that NASA faked the whole thing. “Moonfall” uses one truthful bit – when Apollo 11 went radio-silent for two minutes – as part of a plot point about a major NASA cover-up.

Massimino, who flew on missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope in the 2000s, argues that “when the spacecraft was on the far side of the moon where there's no contact, there was no way for them to have a signal reach earth. And signal dropouts can happen for many reasons.” Adds McKinnon: “I am a little bit afraid about the sort of emails I'm going to get telling me this was a documentary.”

Gravity would totally go kablooey if the moon fell

As the moon gets closer to Earth in the movie, "the whole idea of earthquakes and huge, huge tidal waves was for me a given," Emmerich says. According to McKinnon, all would be legit disasters befalling humanity: Different gravitational pulls would cause havoc with the tides, which would impact the atmosphere and the ground itself. (The fact there would be dangerously depleted oxygen levels was the “most interesting thing for me," Emmerich adds.)

One of the most unrealistic cinematic aspects for McKinnon is that the landslides are too small. “They're like itsy-bitsy baby landslides,” she says. “In real life, without even having the moon do its wonkiness, we've had entire mountains just go down into a valley with a landslide so big and so strong and so hot that it melts the rock.”

Old space shuttles couldn't reach the moon to save the day

To launch into space for the epic “Moonfall” final act, our heroes strap into a shuttle that's been mothballed in a museum for years. “It’s actually still the only object that can take a big payload,” Emmerich says. However, Massimino says, “there is absolutely no way” this scenario flies.

First off, he says, the highest the shuttle could go with rockets was 350 miles above Earth – where the Hubble is located – and the moon is 240,000 miles away. But even in the movie narrative, where the moon comes close enough that its gravitational pull helps the shuttle get there, it would take longer than three weeks to ready a retired spaceship. “But I do believe if we were faced with a dilemma like this, knowing who we are as a country, as a people, the world, we would pull something together.”

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Incontinence isn't actually an issue in space

In “Moonfall,” Bradley’s character says he couldn’t be an astronaut because of his anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome. However, the fact that "astronauts have checklists and train for every possible scenario” would help with someone's anxiety, McKinnon says, and even IBS wouldn’t be that much of a problem. “Space toilets are actually designed to be able to handle diarrhea and other incontinence issues. Also, your feeling of needing to use the bathroom is dependent upon gravity. If you're in space, you use the facilities on a schedule anyway so it really doesn't matter. You just increase the schedule.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Moonfall' fact check: Could the moon fall out of orbit and hit Earth?