In the Shadow of the Moon is the sum of many parts that don’t quite add up. Part crime noir, part action film and part sci-fi adventure, Moon resembles The Terminator cross-pollinated with Seven, yet never quite matching either film’s punch.
Director Jim Mickle has balanced genres before, with standout movies including Cold in July and We Are What We Are. But an odd hodgepodge film like this needs a charismatic anchor as versatile as its subject matter, and Boyd Holbrook, while an apt lantern-jawed protagonist, doesn’t quite have the nerve and ambition of his material.
Holbrook (Logan, Narcos, The Host) plays Tom Lockhart, a Philadelphia cop whose life forever changes on a night in 1988. Just before his pregnant wife (Rachel Keller) goes into labor, Tom stumbles upon one of the strangest cases in the history of the city of brotherly love. A concert pianist, bus driver and fry cook all die at the exact same time, their brains literally oozing out of their eyes, ears, and mouths. All have puncture wounds at the backs of the necks and a suspect soon surfaces, a young black woman in a blue hoodie (Cleopatra Coleman). Lockhart and his partner (Bokeem Woodbine) soon track the woman, who seems to know a good deal about Tom, including that his wife is about to have a baby girl. 
After what appears to be a violent end to a strange story, Moon jumps ahead to 1997, when it appears a copycat is repeating the same crimes as nine years earlier. But what if it’s not a copycat? What if it’s the same person as in 1988, brought back on the nine-year-cycle of the blood moon? Every nine years, Lockhart goes deeper down the criminal rabbit hole of a case that may hold the future of our entire civilization. Now playing a criminal hunter instead of fugitive, Michael C. Hall also stars, portraying a cop whose job appears to be to call Lockhart crazy every nine years in his thickest Philly accent.
While Moon occasionally strikes procedural gold (it often looks like an updated version of Zodiac), Holbrook and Mickle take the story so seriously it never gets time to romp in the cinematic playground that is b-movie sci-fi. If anything, the closer that Holbrook and Mickle get to the core of the case — that someone is injecting victims with a parasitic isotope — the more dull the case becomes.The problem is that Moon makes little effort to keep its viewers mystified, so the audience isn’t going to be nearly as blown away as Mickle and screenwriters Gregory Weidman and Geoffrey Tock seem to assume we’ll be.
Part of the movie’s stumbles are due to pacing. The film, which is two hours long, hopscotches through five different time periods that are spaced nine years apart (1988, 1997, 2006, 2015, and 2024). In each time frame we learn a little bit more about what’s happening, and every new revelation seems more far-fetched than the previous. While there is tragedy along the way (Locke has to raise his daughter by himself), that doesn’t substitute for character development. Holbrook isn’t a bad actor, but he’s called only to don more stringy and bedraggled hair as time marches forward, and the aesthetic change doesn’t suffice for an emotional one. None of the movie’s performances are bad; but none particularly stand out, either.
The conspiracy, ultimately, is all about race, and there’s a mad scientist (Rudi Dharmalingam) bent on erasing centuries of hate. But even topicality can’t save this Netflix project from expositional bloat. In the Shadow of the Moon’s title is meant to make a larger statement about reversing the cycles of racism. And the film is pointedly proud of being woke. You, however, may not be by the time the credits roll.
