RIP Donald Sutherland (July 17, 1935 - June 20, 2024)

The last film I watched that had Donald Sutherland in it was Moonfall, a sci-fi disaster film about the moon falling towards earth. I watched it in February 2022 in a cinema in Dubai.

I don’t remember much of it now, but I do remember the only scene he appeared in, where he quietly entered in a wheelchair, said his lines and wheeled himself out of the scene.

It was a scene with Halle Berry.

I particularly love this line by him, “Yeah, well anyone who follows orders pretty much always does, don't they?”, his response to “You had blood on your hands”.

This is the compete scene:

Holdenfield (Donal Sutherland): What are you doing?

Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry): Holdenfield?

Holdenfield: You're not supposed that, 136 Alpha. That's classified. Top secret.

Jocinda Fowler: Why is NASA lying about all this?

Holdenfield: July 20, 1969. "One small step for a man, One giant leap for"... yada, yada, yada. In school, you were taught that Apollo 11 lost contact with mission control for two minutes. Not true. Mission control cut their feed to the world because they found something on that day. Strange, pulsating lights emanating from beneath the moon's crust. It was me who was assigned to keep it under wraps. The Apollo crew played ball. Everyone after. Just Brian Harper wouldn't. They called him crazy. Threw him out with the trash.

Jocinda Fowler: You're telling me that the moon was effectively the biggest cover-up in human history?

Holdenfield: [laughing] Biggest? Probably.

Jocinda Fowler: You had blood on your hands, too.

Holdenfield: Yeah, well anyone who follows orders pretty much always does, don't they? That technology is light years ahead of us. Compared to that, we're the Stone Age. The only shot we had to stop it was Zulu X-Ray 7. It was shutdown. Shelved. For budgetary reasons. Well, Commander, I have pressing business waiting for me on my desk.

Jocinda Fowler: The sand in the hourglass is dropping quickly for all of us.

Holdenfield: Well, It's good as gone. I'm really sorry. Really.

There are so many other great roles to choose from, but for now, I will share the music video for Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting (directed by Julian Doyle), starring Donald Sutherland.