Lucybespro
It is a performances centric movie
Brendon Jones
It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Rio Hayward
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
bowmanblue
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.
Menno
OK so there are some problems with this movie I'll give you that but still I want to focus on the positives. I give it a 6 out of 10 for those.1 The acting is okay. For those who don't agree: We had a politician here who made a campaign film, now that was bad acting! 2 It's internationally oriented. For once it is not just the United States who is affected and who magically saves the world. Actually the Europeans and Russians play their part.3 Even if it is just for a brief moment the Germans and French talked German and French. For the rest of the movie regional accents are heard. 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. It's fine for a movie back then but now moviegoers know more and are therefor more demanding on this point. They should have taken a little more care in getting the basics right, even if the higher science doesn't add up.2 that the US would decide on this without consulting it's international partners (I believe that China, Russia, the EU and others would want a say in that and all hell would break loose if they didn't get a say) this would be the spoilerisch bit, even if I believe anyone would see this coming. 3 that the US president would be stupid enough to prefer the option of the army over the option presented by a large international team of scientists (who are in consensus for once). Especially when the option by the military is considered as counterproductive for years by scientists and administrators for years.
innocuous
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.
drhugh
Arthur C. Clark did the film world a great disservice when he made the memorable comment that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)Film producers NOW think that SCIENCE = MAGIC. Really, folks, if any illiterate can make a science-fiction movie, why do universities BOTHER giving film degrees? There was a highly-readable article in the April 2009 Scientific American describing what is a "brown dwarf". A white dwarf, a superdense left-over from the life-cycle of a star like our sun, cools down to a BLACK dwarf, and certainly that would screw up the orbit of the moon and make a nasty hole. Perhaps the censor board wouldn't let them use the term "black dwarf" with the word "penetrate"...Fiction or no, it is simply wrong to mislead the public, poor ignorant sods that they are, about something any fool could learn on Wikipedia. Not that anyone would look it up, since the movies tell us everything we need to know. And if anything doesn't make sense, or if Spartacus is wearing a Rolex, then "Wizards did it"!
