Impact

Plot synopsis:
During a meteor shower said to be the most spectacular in 10,000 years, an asteroid hidden by the meteor field strikes the Moon. Fragments of the asteroid and of the Moon itself penetrate Earth's atmosphere and make impact. The initial damage is minimal, though significant physical damage to the lunar surface can be seen from Earth. Experts believe that the Moon has stabilized into a slightly closer orbit. Then strange anomalies begin to manifest themselves on Earth, including cell phone disruptions, unusual static discharges and odd tidal behavior. The world's leading scientists, including Alex Kittner, Maddie Rhodes, and Roland Emerson, begin piecing together evidence that suggests the moon's properties have been permanently altered because the asteroid that hit the Moon was actually a fragment of a brown dwarf; the fragment is highly magnetized and more massive than the Earth despite being only 19 kilometers across, and it is still inside the moon. When the Moon's new, more elliptical orbit brings it closer to Earth, electromagnetic surges begin affecting the surface, causing people, vehicles, and other objects to levitate at random, worldwide. Alex, Maddie, Roland and the rest of their team soon discover that the Moon's new orbit will cause it to collide with the Earth in 39 days, completely destroying the planet. After a failed attempt by the United States to destroy the Moon with nuclear weapons after not listening to the above scientists as it usually happens, the three scientists plan an international mission to the Moon, where astronauts must construct a device to magnetize the Moon's core, causing it to disgorge the embedded brown dwarf fragment, eliminating the magnetic effects and restoring the Moon to a stable orbit. Because of their unique expertise, Alex and Roland must join an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut on the mission, which is expected to be a one-way trip.Roland's pregnant fiancée, Martine Altmann, was travelling across Germany on a train that levitated and derailed. She and an American, Bob Pierce, are able to lead the survivors to a military convoy, and Bob convinces the soldiers to allow Martine to ride to Roland's location. She and Roland are immediately married. Alex's children are left in the care of their late mother's father. When they attempt to drive cross-country to reunite with Alex, their car levitates and crashes. After a confrontation with a man hoarding resources at a convenience store, the children's grandfather suffers a fatal heart attack. The other man originally plans to leave alone, but has a change of heart and brings the children to Washington, DC. Alex is already in space, but he had asked Maddie, with whom he once had a romantic relationship, to make sure his children remained safe. He is able to tell his children "goodbye" over a video feed.On the Moon, the electromagnetic machine is assembled. Roland and the astronaut, Courtney, travel in a rover to locate a fissure in the lunar surface. The rover crashes deep inside the fissure and Courtney falls to her death. Roland is unharmed but trapped inside the fissure and unable to rejoin the spacecraft. He demands that the cosmonaut, Sergei, launch the module so that he and Alex can be saved. The device is activated, causing a large explosion on the Moon, which kills Roland. The Moon splits in two as the brown dwarf fragment flies into the Sun. The orbit of the lunar debris is stable. Sergei and Alex make radio contact, revealing that they escaped the Moon before the explosion, much to the surprise and excitement to Maddie and Alex's kids. Back on Earth, Alex is reunited with his children and with Maddie. Film ends with Alex and Maddie staring briefly at the now fragmented moon before getting into an SUV together.

Tags: melodrama

Review:
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.
(I'd like to look for more of his movies to rent: I enjoy his work.) And, of course, all us old-timers know that all female space scientists are blonde, slender, very attractive, 30 to 35 years old, and possessed of big boobs.
(Think "Jurassic Park" as a good example.)Some of us have worked hard to educate this country in science, and seeing this movie is so discouraging, as if taunting us by saying we are never going to win..
Scientific inaccuracies abound as the moon gets shell-shocked by (ready?) a brown dwarf, making it heavier than the Earth, and causing freakish electro magnetitism, weird gravity, etc.A guilty pleasure, for sure: I love these "the end of the world threatens" flicks where a bunch of scientists try to save us all from annihilation.
This flick "borrowed" elements from Armageddon and other movies, but at least it was free.Considering the outlandish script, the acting was actually pretty good, including the child actors.
The director did the most possible with the plot-hole-ridden story, and some of the weird stuff that happens is even fun to watch.Cinematic fast food that's amusing, and doesn't cost a lot..
It's a globe spanning disaster movie with a pretty cool premise - the moon hitting the planet.Because it's on TV, the only thing it asks of you is your time.
I'm looking for entertainment and the premise of the moon hitting the earth is a spell-binding one.It's also Sci-Fi so it's fine to stretch the facts.
It's as if the writers got together over Domino's pizza, cheap beer and bad weed and said: "Let's take every disaster-movie cliché, one-dimensional character-stereotype and hoary, time-worn situation fiction has ever come up with, lump them in together with crappy special effects, laughable "science" and all the inane pop-psyche observations about the 'human condition' we can think of, then pitch it to the network execs.
Well, except that the full moon would have made watching a meteor shower much more difficult and that it appeared to be night time, simultaneously, everywhere on Earth.
Entertaining movies usually have great editing and special effects - not this film!
Then I read online summaries, and now this sounds just too stupid to have even been filmed (and this from someone who's watched "Plan 9 From Outer Space" more than once).So...an asteroid hits the moon (plausible) and changes its orbit (no doubt) so that the Earth is threatened (the only reason we all care to watch!).
So far, so good.But, the asteroid strike on the moon causes random periods of zero gravity at random points on the earth's surface.
Faulty science (totally ridiculous at times), bad script, horrible acting (notwithstanding a rather 'stellar' cast for this type of movie) all add up to a real disaster.
Later it is learned that was not a meteor: it was quite literally a shooting star twice as large as the asteroid that supposedly killed the dinosaurs.Debris from the moon heads toward Earth and creates chaos.
The moon ends up 30,000 kilometers closer to Earth at its nearest point, and it is getting significantly larger in the sky.Maddie and Alex are asked what is going on.
This one, though, is magnetized and very heavy.Roland concludes this is a piece of a brown dwarf--a former star so heavy that the moon, with the star inside it, now has twice the mass of Earth.
Its orbit is very erratic and these weird events are going to keep happening as the moon approaches Earth each time.Maddie, Roland and Alex are part of a group of scientists called together to figure out what to do.
Once again, I would say the final solution must be seen like one would watch The Super Bowl.I don't imagine most science teachers will be happy with this movie.
That was another miracle.If you want to watch a TV movie about a disaster, you could do worse..
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.
This made-for-TV flick is distinguished by some epic bad acting, ridiculous plot, absurd directing, and a cringe-worthy script.Two things were good about the movie.First, the cinematography is professional for a TV movie.Second, the movie is so horrible that I did not feel guilty about turning it off partway through, so I did not waste too much time.The plot from what I saw appeared to violate most laws of physics and common sense.
The acting features a hilarious scientist who looks and talks like she failed sixth-grade science and never took another course in the area.
Its a cocktail of movies what if you mixed Armageddon, Deep Impact and split the moon the result would be this fun day of destruction mini series...heck I even bought the DVD.
I would think the blond actress, Natasha whatever would know some science and would have raised some kind of objections in the production but then when you see the size of her boobs and the color of her hair, you realize she is probably brain-dead and you move on.
Consequently all the effects from the moon coming closer to earth and the final successful solution of the problem are completely wrong.This production cost more than 10 million to make.
Brown Dwarf - Ha Ha. This film from the point of view of family relationships is quite good, but it completely fails once it enters the realm of science, and is not even good 'Science Fiction.' The fragment that hits the moon is reputed to be from a brown dwarf, brown dwarfs are astrophysical objects that are intermediate entities between planets and stars.
Stars like the sun are not immensely dense, in fact the density of our sun is comparable to that of water and 'brown dwarfs' are of the order of .1 of a solar mass so the film as usual for Hollywood and TV is based on a failed premise.
I think they meant to use a fragment of a 'Neutron Star,' as this would have fit with the effects described and even the goofs section is inaccurate about the suggested effects of an impact with the moon of a brown dwarf fragment.
Brown dwarfs are failed stars/suns and if they were broken up they would diminish due to molecular reactions because gravity would no longer keep the fragments together and they would most probably combine with other molecules and elements to form conglomerate meteor/asteroids that would not be very dense at all.
Very possibly one of the worst science-fiction movies ever made this century..
This one makes me want to hang my head in shame at the thought that the screenwriters' VERY sketchy grasp of science is being shown outside the country, helping to give our people a mostly undeserved reputation for crass stupidity.If I could burn every reel, tape and DVD of a movie, it would be this one..
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.
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?
As was already pointed out, a brown dwarf is a small star about 13 or more times the mass of Jupiter.
The same side of the Moon may not keep facing the Earth - the impact might set it spinning, or the oval orbit could break up the 1:1 resonance with the Earth.The scenes of things floating up are odd.
Impact is the kind of sci-fi movie you get when you spend the budget on well known (TV) actors and story instead of dumping it all into CGI effects and explosions.
The implementation of science from old 1950s movies and unintentionally goofy dialogue result in some laugh out loud moments, but most of the time it's not too distracting.The main story is original, although quite far fetched at times.
To begin with, some positives: the cast did pretty well with what they were given, most of the subplots were interesting and resolved pretty well, and unlike a lot of similar movies, the emotional layers were played realistically.So this is not irredeemable, but as with all science fiction, it lives or dies on the science.There are three ways it can work: 1).
Good science throughout is best, but how many movies manage that?This piece tries for option 3, with detailed scientific explanations everywhere, but almost every use of science is wrong.
They might have meant Neutron Star material, except that would have been way heavier that they wanted (mass of Sun not Earth) which would wreck the rest of the plot.Secondly, whichever option they actually meant, something that dense, that fast hitting the moon is likely to shatter it and keep on going.
Funnier would be that if the fragment hit the moon and stuck as in the film its momentum (remembering that the fragment was 6-10 times heavier than the moon) would knock the moon completely out of orbit.Lastly, the object has to be a fragment of White Dwarf/Neutron Star/whatever as a whole one is way too big for the plot to work.
The only problem with that is how on earth you break a piece off of one of the densest objects in the universe.It feels nit-picky to go through things like this, but the same is true of every part of the plot that is science-Dependant.
In fact it is the very first movie that I ever watched where the moon is picked as the adversary that will wipe out the entire earth and humanity with it.When I started watching this probably 4-hour movie made for television, I thought that it was just one of those movies dealing with meteors hitting the earth.
The entire plot can be summed up in one paragraph: Meteor collides with the moon, puts it off orbit on a collision course with earth.
The scenes of the moon looking huge in the sky were very eerie and will stay in the mind as they did look terrific.I thought the running time of 3 hours really suited it as well although I watched it all in one go, you can easily spread this over 2 nights because the break means there is a bit of a cliff hanger.I also must give a mention to the score as that was again first rate.Although I am a bit of a sucker when it come to disaster type movies, I put this right up there with Armageddon and Deep Impact.
- Spoiler Alert - terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie.
**Possible Spoilers**I have seen some bad Sci Fi, but if you ever needed a title to show you just how low movie makers could go, this is it.
They do more than make the scientists stupid to pander to explanations for the audience, they get even the basic science wrong.Amidst fantastical sequences of flying cars because of the disastrous impact on the moon, we are left to wonder why.
-This Review contains spoilers-That the "science" in this movie doesn't make any sense at all is not the biggest problem, it's a movie, although there are a lot of obvious blunders.The script however slowly drags itself forward, there is way too much irrelevant details in this movie.What irritated me the most about this movie were the grandfather and those annoying brads, sure just crowbar somebody to the ground when he tries to defend his supplies against thieves.The acting in general (apart from those kids) wasn't all that bad.
Impact is a great entertainment and a clever show with a cool premise - the moon hitting the planet like someone here said.
And its much more than that, we have meteorites, a brown dwarf, mysterious anomalies on earth, lots of theoretical and practical discussion about gravity and electromagnetism...etcFor the people who are questioning the science in this show here we go: 1-In our reality there are a lot of theories...
3-The awesome Electromagnetic power level (also derived from the impact between the moon and the dwarf) explains the electrical problems and why people or objects started to "fly"!!
(END SPOILER)I mean, here we have a good science fiction movie with a good script where we can actually learn about something and think about others subjects, interesting characters, reasonable acting, decent special effects (for a TV show), lots of mystery and speculation about what the hell is happening ...
Getting the Moon and a "Brown-Dwarf Fragment" in on the story was also very interesting, the sort of thing that one usually only reads about in er..
There is nothing worth laughing about here."Impact" is for lovers of very 'basic' SciFi or those who like crude disaster-movies.
The likes of Natasha Henstridge and James Cromwell are the ones caught up in the usual outlandish plot involving an asteroid crashing into the Moon and subsequently causing chaos on Earth.
Really, folks, if any illiterate can make a science-fiction movie, why do universities BOTHER giving film degrees?
Not that anyone would look it up, since the movies tell us everything we need to know.
Not only crashed into the moon, but leaves behind something that effects planet Earth as we know it.
The last review I did was for 'Tornado Valley', the summary title I put for that was 'But...but...tornadoes do not work that way!', and as you can see from the summary title for this review, this is now the second, wait, third film I have seen where the makers of the film have broken the laws of reality.First problem, whether it was a dwarf star or something else that doesn't make sense, it still has to be one big freaking meteor to knock the MOON out of orbit.By the way, that's the plot, the moon gets knocked out of orbit and is on a collision course with Earth.
The brown dwarf in this story is so massive that the Moon becomes more massive than the Earth.
But the movie ends with people looking up to see the Moon in two fragments.
Not the whole world speaks American English.4 It was enjoyable to watch if you don't focus to much on the negatives.The trouble I had with it are the following: 1 It's scientific basis is as good as a 1950's movie there are a lot of things that don't add up.
The story plot, that the moon was hit by an asteroid many times the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, was actually pretty good, CG could've been a little better, but not everyone is Michael Bay. The part I did not like the most is the part on the moon, to me it wasn't suspenseful, and I don't like the fact that they pretty much split the moon in half.
But if you are an Armageddon fan like me, don't watch this movie.