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.

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!

If not anything else, "Without Warning" proves that a film can be memorable and highly original without being brilliant. This is by no means a masterpiece, but it fully serves its purpose and resembles a punch in the stomach when you least expect it.

Didn't come up with high expectations (found it on YouTube), but the uncertainty building up throughout the film kept me watching. The ending caught me completely off guard. What makes this film so disturbing is that the story unwraps slowly, without being too explicit or over the top. By far one of the most plausible and haunting pieces apocalyptic fiction I've ever seen.

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.

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.