Annihilation Earth

I actively hated this movie, and I'm a gal who tends to cut sci-fi movies a lot of slack because I love them so much, even the bad ones.

But this one -- wow.

The single stupidest and most insulting thing about Annihilation Earth (and of too many sci-fi and disaster movies) is that it gives only one or two scientists -- in the entire world -- the expertise and power to make crucial decisions affecting millions (and possibly billions) of people.

Annihiliation Earth is such a movie, in spades. No involvement with any national or worldwide governmental or scientific body -- just Luke Goss and Marina Sirtis getting all tense with each other.

This nation's already poor science literacy certainly won't be improved with preposterous flicks like this one.

From the start, it was unbearable to watch Marina Sirtis try a southern accent. She was never a great actress, her only claim to fame being the annoying Betazoid on STNG. And her acting was painful there. I seem to remember her in another SciFi disaster flick and her acting there was only marginally better. I thought she'd ruin this movie. But she didn't, she only made the torture more unbearable. To this they added two panting, sweating, whiny-voiced porn stars in unnecessary roles. What in theory should have been a good plot line was ruined by crummy dialog, trite and tiresome clichés, and horrendous acting. This was a disastrous movie, even by SyFy "original" standards.

There were other British actors in the movie that went with speaking in their natural accents, but Sirtis attempted to speak in an American accent and it wasn't working. She kept drifting in and out of what I assume was supposed to be a southern drawl. Terrible. The movie in general just dragged on and I could not watch it until the end.

"Colliders" have gone berserk. They're some kind of mega-efficient energy providing devices (I guess), and now they're colliding with Mother Nature. I think. Things are blowing up.

One of the premier scientists in the world, who engineered this technology talks on his cell phone a lot. Usually to an almost unrecognizable Marina Sirtis (Star Trek, Next Gen). "David, this is all your fault. You better stop these disasters." She then hangs up, waits for another catastrophe to occur, then calls him: "David, you really need to stop these disasters. Now, David." It really started to sound like Hal 9000 after a while.

Anyway, what story there is, takes the normal course in a "world may end because of bad science" movie, with a very obvious but still nonsensical ending. As for Marina, she's probably still yelling at David.

I wasn't expecting much considering SyFy's (very) dubious reputation, didn't get much. In fact, the whole film was a near irredeemable mess, with barely tolerable effects(only giving that phrase merely because I've seen worse like in Titanic II), slipshod filming and very lazy directing. The acting is terrible, Luke Goss is not bad actually but he deserved much better than what he got but Marina Sirtis with her forced delivery and a "southern" accent that is so laughable it leaves you speechless is a completely different story. The script has far too many stilted and stilted lines and contains scientific errors so vast and so glaringly off that you could tell that not much research if any went into it and the characters are underdeveloped and stereotypical. Not to mention the story, which was dull and very structurally thin, with many moments that didn't ring true to me, I agree about the issues about the lab assistants being too attractive and feeling too shoe-horned in and about the terrorists getting into the facility far too easily. The ending was the only part of the movie that didn't feel like nonsense, but considering how preposterous the rest of the movie is, this no-nonsense approach was jarring. Overall, really quite appalling. 1/10 Bethany Cox