Halle Berry is going full Armageddon in upcoming Roland Emmerich sci-fi film Moonfall

The man behind Independence Day and its sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, is giving sci-fi fans a new spaceborne disaster with Moonfall — and he's already cast an impressive lead to save the world.

Halle Berry is going to star in writer/director Roland Emmerich's upcoming film about a team scrambling to stop the Moon from cratering into Earth. Sound like a familiar plot for fans of astronaut antics? The late '90s are back and they're bringing their Deep Impact/Armageddon killer-comet freak-outs with them. But in 2020, everything is bigger, which means the thing coming to demolish our planet is the Moon itself.

According to an official announcement, the Oscar-winning Berry (John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, the X-Men franchise) is leading the charge to stop this. She's a NASA astronaut-turned-administrator looking to help a team land on the Moon itself, using her mysterious past experience to help figure out what knocked the Moon out of orbit in the first place.

The plot is still hush-hush on what exactly smacked our beloved Moon toward terra firma, but the "mysterious force" likely has something to do with something Berry ran into on a previous mission. Aliens perhaps? The script — co-written by Emmerich, his 2012 scribe Harald Kloser, and Spenser Cohen (Extinction) — had previously cited Close Encounters of the Third Kind as an influence, so maybe!

But with a scrappy team of weirdos (and Halle Berry) trying to stop disaster, Moonfall is definitely going to feel like a throwback disaster film. Berry joins a cast that so far only includes Josh Gad, because that man is everywhere. Gad plays the goofball eccentric scientist of the team (every team needs one) who predicts that moonfall and helps them prepare for the unexpected and odd disaster. It sounds like there're plenty more slots to be filled still, with a similarly A-list approach for the leads.

Moonfall has been kicking around Hollywood since 2016, when it was sold as a spec to Universal. Now, it's at Lionsgate, begins production in Montreal this fall, and heads to theaters sometime in 2021.