Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Impact is basically a 'disaster movie' but on television (Think 'a Michael Bay film, but without the budget or stars). An asteroid has only gone and knocked the moon out of orbit and now our former lunar buddy is on a collision course for Earth, dooming the lot of us.But don't worry, seeing as Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck were unavailable to fly up there and blow it out of the stars, we have a team of international boffins who will come up with something to save us all. In the end they simply must have watched Armageddon, as they decide to fly up there and blow it up (just with worse special effects).Most people could probably put aside the slightly dubious special effects and lack of big-name actors and give Impact a chance. However, its main problem is simply its lack of originality. Even if you do leave out the dodgy scientific theories behind the scenario, what you have here is one disaster movie cliché after another. The dialogue is horrendous and even when the action does pick up a bit and focus on the (slightly) more interesting characters, it keeps hopping back to some severely boring ones (aka their various families, who all happen to have put themselves in perilous danger at the same time).I was never that much of a fan of Armageddon. I found it too over-the-top and daft to really enjoy properly. However, after watching Impact, give me Steve Tyler's 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing' any day.

This was billed as "Science fiction", but frankly it's just "Fantasy". There isn't the slightest attempt to involve any actual science - the scriptwriter just keeps saying outlandish things and the actors struggle to make it seem like they believe this is how the world works.In the minute or two before the beginning titles, for example, we are told that "the biggest meteor shower for (X) years" is about to happen. We cut between crowds of people gathered in fields all round the world, every one with a telescope on a tripod, peering into a dark sky.1) Meteor showers happen as the Earth passes through a particle cloud; they're only seen on the leading side of the planet, not the whole planet simultaneously.2) Astronomers only gather in that way to view localised phenomena such as total solar eclipses, not wide-ranging phenomena such as meteor showers.3) You don't use a telescope to look at a meteor shower. Ever.4) With all these astronomers around, didn't anyone notice it was a bit odd that it was dark *all the way round the world at the same time*...? I would have thought the sudden and complete disappearance of the Sun would have provoked more comment than a meteor shower would.And all this was before the titles.Other things, like the fact there was a rock on the Moon that was one and a half times the mass of the Earth, yet the Moon only changed its orbit slightly (when, in reality, at that point the Earth would have, at best, been in orbit around the Moon...) were glossed over.Or how they managed to fit five people, a huge "scanner", a 2-man rocket sled and a missile launch platform into the nosecone of a rocket that can usually only hold three people maximum, and they still had room to get in and out of their space suits? Oh, and the missile had huge stabilising fins and could manoeuvre in huge, graceful curves - in a vacuum. And despite being only about twice the size of an astronaut it had enough power to split the moon in two. Oh, and somehow it mysteriously dissipated the rock with 1.5 Earth masses, without any of it falling to Earth.I've seen a few reviews saying the actors were "good". Well, they were "good" *for soap opera*, which is what the script degenerated to fairly quickly.It was *almost* as bad as the movie "The Core". Almost.

Yeah, I kind of got a kick out of it, but not for the reasons the film-makers intended. This is one of the few disaster movies that makes "Armaggeddon" look like it was written by geniuses and "The Core" like it was made as an instructional film for use in college geology courses. The wide liberties taken with actual fact (and common sense) make for a rollicking time, but it scares me that we're failing in educating the youth of today.I mean, this is only 3 hours long, but in that time you learn that the screenwriters (1) think that the moon has a magnetic field emanating from a core, (2) believe that the "laws of gravity" are that "little objects are attracted to big objects," (3) don't know that cruise missiles are air-breathers and won't operate or even steer in the absence of an atmosphere, (4) don't understand the difference between electromagnetics and gravity, (5) think that it takes longer to walk back to town from a car breakdown than to program, launch, and deliver 87 rockets with nuclear device payloads all the way to the moon, (6) have some bizarre ideas about what a brown dwarf star is, and so forth.But it IS entertaining. Just make sure to have a chat with your kids afterwards to make sure that (a) your son didn't spend the entire movie following Natsha Henstridge's boobs, and (b) that your daughter understands that the science end of it was all BS so she won't be afraid to get her graduate degree in physics. After all, any exposure to the "scientists" in this film is an almost guaranteed turn-off for budding researchers.

As fate would have it, I saw two similar movies, both 3-hour mini-series, within two weeks. This one and "Meteor." Both of them involved possible collisions with the Earth and ending life as we know it. Of the two, I enjoyed this one more, "Impact." The science here appears pretty shaky. A "brown dwarf" is almost a star, but not quite massive enough to become one. Yet they are composed mainly of gases like hydrogen and deuterium (heavy hydrogen). But in this movie a brown dwarf is depicted as having an extremely high density, so much so that a softball-sized fragment cannot be moved by a man. Plus an extremely high magnetic field. There are many other scientific inaccuracies, but we can forgive them all as part of the creative fictional process to give us an interesting movie.And it is an interesting, and mostly entertaining, movie. A brown dwarf fragment makes a high-speed collision with our Moon and embeds itself. This alters the mass, magnetic field, and orbit of the Moon. As the orbit becomes highly elliptical its close approach to the Earth impacts things both electrical and gravitational.But the most worrisome news is that within 39 days the Moon's orbit will cause it to collide with the Earth, if something is not done to prevent that. Therein lies most of the drama.David James Elliott of "JAG" fame is the key scientist, Alex Kittner, along with Natasha Henstridge as Dr. Maddie Rhodes. Steven Culp is the USA President Edward Taylor.The biggest "blunder" in the story is this. The Moon doesn't really revolve around the Earth, in fact both of them revolve around a point between their centers, which is just inside the Earth's outer crust. The brown dwarf in this story is so massive that the Moon becomes more massive than the Earth. So the immediate effect will be that both the Earth and the Moon will revolve around a new point, much closer to the Moon. Both orbits will be dramatically different, but this point is ignored in the movie.SPOILERS: After a military plan to divert the Moon fails, the scientists formulate one which requires Dr Kittner to go to the Moon with a crew of astronauts and deploy a machine he invented, which will reverse the magnetic field of the Brown Dwarf. This will cause it to be ejected in a direction that will also stabilize the Moon's orbit. They do, and Kittner manages to return home to his family. But the movie ends with people looking up to see the Moon in two fragments. Kinda scary.