So exciting it's boring.

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 1998)

The first ten minutes of this film are like the best moments of "Godzilla" without the lizard. Then the excitement and momentum grinds to a dead stop as the movie becomes "Police Academy Goes to Space Camp" for a lousy hour and a half! The movie has its best moments when things finally happen again and two shuttles slingshot around the moon. After that, James Cameron was nice enough to give them all his cutting-room floor pieces from "The Abyss" to fill out the rest of the movie. Michael Bay's typical combination of frenetic, choppy editing and Murphy's Law plot points actually work against feeling any excitement; a viewer gets desensitized by two hours of explosions and quakes! And the plot points are horribly predictable; there aren't any surprises for anyone with an average IQ. I mean, when a young man with his life ahead of him is going to sacrifice himself and a grizzled old guy escorts him out, what's going to happen, ya think? ID4 was much better than this (just to prove I'm not some art house whiner).