Collision fatale

This is what I get for being bored on a Monday night. I mean how bad can it be, Steve Baldwin, Dirk Benedict (Starbuck, where ya been). I at least hope they were able to pay their rent for the month after this.

As the title of this review states the movie is basically Armagedon but instead of an asteroid we are in peril due to the moon and a fault line which has opened up on its surface. The Ed Wood reference is because everything else in the film makes me think that if Ed was still alive and had even the slightest budget this is what he would be making. The shuttle set kept making me remember the plane cockpit from Plan 9, except no curtain for a door this time. All of the effects have a Nintendo 64 look to them (even a PS2 would be better) or a rip from a Discovery channel special on space travel.

Of the acting I can't really complain, nothing great but nothing overly bad. I was excited at the beginning to see Dirk Benedict acting again but he seems to just come in and out of the film.

In the end I think I laughed more then anything, not something to get worked up about for sure.

Also, not to my country's credit, this is a Canadian film not an American one as the IMDb site states. At the end of the credits it clearly states that it is a Ontario-Quebec co-production (so sad).

Alright, if you are at all thinking about seeing this movie, you already know that it is going to be terrible, but the question is will it be terrible in a fun way. For me it was.

Looking at the list of actors, the only recognizable names were Dirk Bennedict and Stephen Baldwin. Of the two I would give Dirk a very slight edge. The actresses do a good to passable job in their roles (in sci-fi channel movies, all the actresses are inevitably very pretty and much better at acting than the men. Of course they are usually confined to sex appeal roles such as in Earthstorm where the assistant is wearing shorts in the opening scene where everyone else is wearing jackets... Aside over), even if they don't have much to work with.

The science in this movie is just terrible. This might have been excusable in the 1950's, but not anymore. Although much of the terrible science is due to bad movie cliché than attempts at actual science. Take the shuttle flying as if there was air in space. Most people aren't ready to have the shuttle flying around with the engines off, or pointed the "wrong way" (since really the shuttle would be spinning like mad to orient the main engines to thrust generally perpendicular to the direction of travel). Then there is the whole gravity on the shuttle thing. This is a cheap movie, no budget to fake zero-G. At least they didn't make believe that there is an artificial gravity, they just ignored that little problem. Oh, and ducking into a tent, that's right a tent, to escape the debris from a collapsing building. Too funny.

Oh, and the clichés! They run rampant. Renegade scientist whose theory ends up saving the day. Child who rebelled against her father, who conveniently died before the movie starts, acts to honor him. The master crackpot scientist who is in charge of creating every do-dad needed in the movie, says it can't be done then does it in twenty minutes. Oh, and let's not forget the evil scientist/politician who constantly stands in the way of the real scientist. It would be hard to put more clichés in this movie.

The funniest part, to me at least, was that they were afraid or perhaps banned, from using NASA in the movie. Unfortunately they couldn't seem to decide if "ASI" stood for American Science Institute or American Space Institute. They also had to make up a science university in Boston, the Plymouth Institute of Technology. Ha ha ha.

Really, if you go into this with a sense of humor, you might get some enjoyment out of it.

The effects in the movie are horrible. As stated before they look like N64 type graphics. The plot seems to be ripped off from Armageddon. An asteroid hits the moon causing a fault and chunks of the moon start flying towards earth.

The one thing that was cool is that ASI is actually Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada dressed up. To be more specific it is the college's I-Wing, which is the Information Technology wing. And the circular room with the TV in the wall is actually there... not just for the movie.

To sum up in one word "underbudget" I wouldn't buy the movie.

Because of an enormous meteor impact, the moon begins to break up, threatening to pummel the Earth with an immense number of meteorites, as well as ravage it with bizarre atmospheric conditions.

It's all routine, incoming meteors threatening the end of the world. Going in, you know this is just escapist nonsense (fashioned suspiciously like Armageddon, but with a lower budget), and will require suspension of disbelief on a grand scale, but be prepared for a meteor shower of plot and character clichés, cheap effects, and an obvious outcome.

The movie spends a lot of time developing likable and interesting characters, and the respectably good acting helps accomplish this. If only the script writers had been just as conscientious about scientific plausibility, the movie would have been better off. You expect less than awesome special effects on this budget, but some of them look downright cheesy. The fireball meteors, for example, looked phonier than Monopoly money.

Clichés: we got 'em: dumb government big shot who makes a nuisance out of himself and mocks others, maverick scientist, meteors targeting big city skyscrapers and nothing else, unknown nobody whose expertise (in this case a building demolisher) saves the world, etc.

Plot holes are far too numerous to list; my two favorites are 1) nobody except the principals suspect the smoking moon (which oddly is always a full moon) and accompanying asteroid bombardment might be related, and 2) the Space Shuttle dodgeball game at a zillion mph with a million meteorites--right out of an old video game. I expected to see the pilot's game score appear in the upper corner of the screen at any moment.

Fun, and laughably outrageous. Looking for plot holes is but one way to enjoy this. Any movie about a guy who implodes buildings being called upon to implode the moon, that's a movie to see, folks.

Watching a movie requires viewers to suspend their disbelief, and this movie has much to disbelieve. We can talk about the unoriginal story, cookie-cutter characters, stiff acting, and phony science, but what's the point? A movie is worth your time if it entertains, and "Earthstorm" succeeds at least in doing that, so let's look at what this film gives us to enjoy.

First, the special effects are not bad. People tend to confuse the "how" with the "what" when judging special effects so that the effects often get the blame for low plausibility. In this film, though, "how" they show is credible even if "what" they show is not.

Second, the music is quite good. It sustains tension throughout the film and adds emotional content at key points--exactly what it a movie score supposed to do.

Third, the acting is adequate. This isn't a film by Cameron, Kubrick, or Crichton, so let's cut the cast some slack. I've never met any demolition experts, but I bet they're more like Stephen Baldwin in "Earthstorm" than like Bruce Willis in "Armageddon". And seeing Dirk Benedict ("Faceman" from the 1980s TV series "The A-Team") as the smug, self-important science advisor to The White House is a treat.

Best of all is the film's message. More-realistic sci-fi movies such as "Alien", "Europa Report", "Gravity", and "The Martian" tell us that space exploration is dangerous and largely unnecessary as if filmmakers want us to stay on our home planet. "Earthstorm" has a positive message: The more we know about space, the better prepared we are to protect life on earth.

Sci-fi has come a long way from the 1950s, but anyone who admires "The Day the Earth Stood Still" has no excuse for disliking this movie.