Without Warning

I had high hopes for this film. The idea of a "War of the Worlds"-style fake news broadcast about an imminent asteroid impact was very intriguing. One of my favorite TV films was 1983's "Special Bulletin", which took a similar approach to the subject of nuclear terrorism.

Unfortunately, this movie fails on almost all levels. The actors playing the news reporters come off like, well, actors playing news reporters. The plot points are just plain silly and melodramatic. The conclusion of the film is wretchedly insipid. In effect, the fact that humankind takes perfectly logical steps to protect ourselves from an asteroid causes super-advanced aliens to think we're too warlike for them to let us live. Or something like that.

The issue of asteroid impacts is real and serious enough that we don't need television trivializing the subject with ridiculous sci-fi elements.

Before I comment on the execution of this 1994 TV movie, I'd like to say something about the unbelievably pompous sermonizing this movie does by offering this hypothetical. Suppose Captain Kirk sent an unmanned shuttle to contact a planet that had never experienced an alien contact before, and then the aliens, not having any clue what this was, then shot the shuttle down. Captain Kirk then decides this is a hostile act and decides to nuke the planet and destroy all life on it.

Now if Captain Kirk did this, you'd think he was a madman and the epitomoe of all things evil. You would not as a matter of course blame the aliens for not knowing any better. So why then I ask, does this TV-movie serve up the exact same premise to us, and then deliver a scathing indictment about how this is all humanity's fault, and that our barbarism caused this, and that ultimately, as Sander Vanocur says before Washington blows up around him, "The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves"? That kind of thinking is not merely insulting to one's intelligence, it's just plain dumb. Yet for some reason, Hollywood has long had a fascination with this incredible cliche of how aliens are always wiser than humans and that any normal reaction of fear on the part of humans constitutes barbarism making destruction by the aliens justifiable (this after all is the very premise of "The Day The Earth Stood Still").

Now setting aside the dumb philosophy, how does this work in terms of execution? Only so-so. I can't believe anyone would have fallen for this in a minute since it should have occurred to them to merely change channels and then remember that the last time Sander Vanocur was a serious journalist was a long time ago. But then again, the people who listened to Orson Welles long ago never had the sense to do that either so I suppose that can be forgiven. The problem with this fake newscast is that we are served up the most shallow of cliched characters to represent the different points of view in the scientific, military and political communities and you can't take them seriously for a second. This is always the greatest problem with any "fake newscast" style of drama. They spend so much time trying to make the newscasting sound authentic that in the end they forget all about trying to make the characters themselves have the ring of authenticity.

As mindless entertainment this film has its merits but for chilling authenticity in a fake newscast, try to find Buffalo radio station WKBW's 1971 update of the War Of The Worlds. THAT was a drama that knew how to push all the right buttons and come off with an air of authenticity.

This is without a doubt, one of the greatest made for TV movies I've ever seen. The first time I saw it, I actually thought what was being reported was really happening, so I changed the channel to CNN to see if they were also reporting on it. This movie is a great way to scare someone by making them think what their watching is real.

We're supposed to believe these aliens were peaceful until we misunderstood them?

That's crazy. If their method of first contact is bombarding a (for all practical purposes) non space faring planet that doesn't their understand their earlier bombardment based communication. Uh...

While it's possible these aliens believe this makes sense, it's ridiculous that the human scientist berates everybody for Earth's response.

The most likely explanation for the aliens' extremely Rube Goldberg method of announcing their 'peaceful' intentions is that it was a pretense- perhaps to assuage their own guilt, or as a formality. Who knows? But there's nothing honest about it at all.

I saw this pretty late at night, and it draws you in so much. The plot twists and turns in an amazing story that mirrors a real-situation, so much that I thought it was a real news broadcast too. Only the appearance of Q from Star Trek, and references to 1994 gave the game away.

The end sequence, from the destruction of the 3 meteors onwards was as tense as many of the scenes in films like Scream. It also showed man's darker side, and gave many lessons for the future.

It wouldn't work on the big screen, but on the small screen it is one of the best films I have seen in a long time. And that's saying a lot for a film of such small stature!