Final Days of Planet Earth

The good is that Darryl Hannah still looks very good. Gil Bellows is competent as the archaeologist who winds up the hero. The rest of the cast is typical for the venue. The screen time is 170 minutes long, but there is only about half that much material here. A decent editing job that cuts the time down to about 100 minutes would do the trick, but then it wouldn't be a mini-series. Usually it takes some interesting characters that get me personally involved to make me want to root for the heroes, but these guys just don't cut it. Some of the scenes are drawn out too long. The dialog is routinely flat. If it wasn't for being on last thing two nights in a row I probably wouldn't have watched it. It does have a few interesting scenes here and there, and the technical visual effects are interesting in places. If you like sci-fi and don't have anything better to do, watch it. Otherwise, look for more interesting fare.

While this terrible mess deserves all the bad things said about it, I have a strong suspicion that the film was not intended to be what finally appeared on the screen. The storyline is simply too screwed-up to have been intentional.

My theory is that the film as published is actually an attempt to resurrect a project that was abandoned without being completed. Perhaps it ran overbudget. Perhaps the principals realised that it would be a dog whatever happened. Perhaps somebody died.

The result was a pile of footage with many scenes unfilmed, and many issues unresolved. Some brave person took this pile of dross and tried to make a coherent movie out of it. Their success was limited, but at least it had a sort-of beginning, a confused middle, and a silly, half-of-an ending. Not having the resources to trim it to normal film length, they made it into a two-parter. Still a disaster, but a little money coming in to cover the completion guarantee.

Well, that's my hope, anyway. Anything to prevent me having to accept that someone actually went out and created this crock on purpose. That would be too much to bear.

CD

Regular TV shows were taken off two nights for this mini-series, mainly because a rival station was showing the Commonwealth Games and I suppose the channel head honchos thought everyone would be watching the athletes and they had to put on SOMETHING so why not this drivel. This was worse than the recent Category 7 (that awful one with Shannon Doherty in it about the hurricane) and Earthquake 10.5 (about a giant earthquake destroying California). At least those two made some sort of sense. Last Days of planet blah reminds me a lot of V (80s miniseries about snake aliens who have human exteriors and are trying to take over the world when they're not eating live rodents), and a bit like the Day of the Body Snatchers (the pod people taking over humans body when their asleep), but without the suspense or character development. It should've been a TV movie instead of a miniseries - it flowed like molasses. Rule number one of scripts is to cut out anything that doesn't add to the plot. Why then stuff this with pointless scenes, like the hero walking furtively through a large room for about 30 seconds when we've seen the room 3 times before, including him and his friends discussing its purpose at length earlier, as well as the villains coming in later and discussing their dastardly plans just in case we can't connect the dots and get the point? 30 seconds is a looonnngggg time in TV land. Ditto the bad and pointless dialogue between characters sitting in vans waiting for something to happen. Show me that something happening - not the non-value-adding talk in vans! And how they overcome the dastardly villains was lamo.

Even Darryl Hannah couldn't save this one. What was the weird thing with her eyes and forehead? Bad lighting? Bad botox? And why does Australian TV keep buying this crude and why do I feel compelled to watch this trainwreck TV? I blame aliens. 1/10

Its getting harder and harder to get any original ideas for films. I guess the old standards make money and that's the key. Final Days of Planet Earth is about alien insects that make their way to earth to colonize earth using humans as fodder – literally. Good acting from a very solid and well established cast and some good writing takes the slight twist on Invasion of The Body Snatchers and makes it good. While the plot languishes, the CGI is good, and the cinematography is also good. The action and story move along just fast enough to keep your interest. A good solid B movie with no pretense toward block buster status.

Seeing Final Days of Planet Earth with nothing better to do I saw it with relatively low expectations and actually it is not great by any stretch of the imagination it was a little better than I anticipated. SyFy have done much worse than this. It does have a great title and the cast are better than average, Gil Bellows in a quite charismatic performance faring best. Daryl Hannah has given more natural performances in the likes of Splash and Roxanne but still looks gorgeous and sexy and gives her character the right amount of evilness. The scenery is decent also, and the soundtrack likewise. On the other hand, Final Days of Planet Earth is too long, everything feels very drawn dull and what made the film furthermore dull was that the story is not enough to sustain the running time so felt padded and aimless at certain points. The beginning is also very confused, and there are one too many ridiculous parts to single out. The effects are not as bad as I've seen in other SyFy movies but still look rather slapdash, while the script is stilted in flow and flatly written. The characters are also not that interesting, either coming across as stereotypical, underdeveloped or both, and I wasn't really all that surprised by the Queen's identity. All in all, there has been far worse but at the same time there is nothing to rave about. 4/10 Bethany Cox