Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

IMO sci-fi has two parts...'science' and 'fiction'…this series misses both, Lets start with the 'fiction' part slash plot ….government hi-tech experiment goes bad…sun is going ham on planet earth…human hero 'bad-boy-knows-it-all' saves earth from the sun…then he knows how to restart the core…then he restarts the core with a machine that he kept in his barn … and finally he gets the girl!My personal metric is which of this ''original story'' couldn't have been written by a 10 year old...verdict: not much … have to give credit though for the 'really fictional' parts i could spot.. the fact that he did all this while getting chased by the US military – and the part that he could operate a multimillion-high-tech-sun-magnetosphere-disruption- facility with just his daughter and her boyfriend … ah and the president dies of falling debris because he was giving a speech under a half collapsed building <- this was a good one About the 'science' part -Not there- And no ..you don't have to be or pretend to be a scientist to figure out that downtown Chicago, Big Ben and Athens is ridiculously unlikely to be destroyed by satellite debris. Or if you turn a blind eye on the solar- flare-induced-6.5-earthquake, how can you not wonder why the heck the epicenter was somewhere in East Coast US? I watch sci-fi and enjoy it because it could show a glimpse of what might happen after 50-100-10000000 with a lots of sauce of course, but with some respect to some scientific hard facts .. this film was about what could never happen in a trillion years in the most remote parallel universe.Acting was alright I guess ...

My review is very unfair because I have only seen the first half. It is extremely formulaic - the only smart guy is in disgrace, and has a beautiful, plucky daughter (don't they always?); the ESTABLISHMENT is full of weasels who are interfering with solving the problem, and the science is beyond ludicrous. But hey, it's good dumb fun. I wouldn't wait in line to see it, nor make space in my busy schedule, nor pay extra, but as a filler after you need to "come down" from an episode of Breaking Bad, if you like B-grade sci fi and/or disaster movie stuff, it works just fine. Strangely, the acting isn't all that bad. On the one hand, there are rug-chewing villains (the slime literally rolls off the "Secretary" whose self-serving unwillingness to listen to scientific advice causes the catastrophe; the hero's ex-wife's new husband is an unrelenting sleaze, etc.) But scientist/hero Modine is quite good in his role, and the scientist who unleashed the disaster (under pressure from the "Secretary") is actually pretty good too, coming across as sort of a normal person (well, normal for someone who has just destroyed the planet). Anyway, in the "good dumb fun" category I give this high marks. Others have compared it to "Eve of Destruction" and like "Eve" I have only seen one half, but will gladly view the second halves when the opportunity arises.

Out of the four mini-series personally viewed in the past two weeks airing on the SyFy channel, CAT.8 is better than Ring of Fire(though at least that had Terry O'Quinn) and especially the irredeemably terrible Meteor with Christopher Lloyd. But of the four the best was Eve of Destruction, although that was a long way from great that looked reasonably good and at least four of the actors were convincing. CAT.8 also has some better-than-average acting, Matthew Modine is a commendable lead, and the production values(apart from some hokey effects) are reasonable, basic though with some signs of atmospheric. On the whole however CAT.8 doesn't work. What really lets things down is the story and the science. To say that the science is questionable is an understatement in itself, if anything it is a disaster, so bad that experts would feel tempted to bail out halfway through the first half. It honestly sounded like the writers were making things up with no research and it was very difficult to believe any of it. As a result the story was implausible and had little if any credibility. Unfortunately also for the story it didn't feel enough to sustain the three hours, so it felt like a thin structure interwoven with a lot of padding, ham-fisted melodrama/exposition, underdeveloped sub-plotting and an overlong length. If you think the first half takes too long to get going and is implausible, wait until you see the second half, like with the Meteor, Ring of Fire and even Eve of Destruction it gets increasingly dull and illogical. The script is underwritten, cheesy and very awkward, another one of those instances where it came through clearly that the writers hadn't properly checked to see whether what they'd written and given the actors made sense. The music is turgid and unmemorable, the pacing is pedestrian and stretches the story out too much, the characters are nowhere near developed enough which is inexcusable for a mini-series of this length and generally CAT.8 feels under-directed and characterless. On the whole, there is worse out there but this was rather poor stuff, the best assets are the production values and the acting but the story, script, pacing and especially the science bog things down considerably. 3/10 Bethany Cox

I agree completely with Ed Blackadder's review. Why is it so very difficult for the writers of scripts that pretend to be "science" fiction to ask even a serious amateur science enthusiast to review their scripts (I'd do it for free) to catch their innumerable errors and misrepresentations of natural phenomenon? Did the writers of this bad joke sleep through their grade school and high school science classes? Apparently. And they must also believe that everyone else did, too.If you are a SCIENCE fiction fan, you'll want to skip this one unless you want to watch for a few laughs. However, that probably won't hold you through the entire show. I stopped watching to write this after the hilariously wrong satellite sequence about 20 minutes in. Gawd...