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There's one area in which television can never be as good as the theatrical movie -- the summer blockbuster. It's one of the reasons they say television is a writer's medium and movies are a director's medium. Actually, they should update that to say: "Movies are a special-effects medium."
The fact is, with television's 21-inch frame and the low cost of producing made-for-TV movies, you'll never see a disaster movie in your living room with quite the same bravado as an "Armageddon" or "Transformers." All a movie like "Impact," ABC's two-part, four-hour epic, can do to trump a theatrical movie is to offer better writing and more thoughtful characters. After watching this bloated disaster movie, my first thought was, "Well, so
| Village Vidiot blog
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This plodding, lifeless science-fiction thriller about the moon careening toward Earth has about as much, um, impact as a wet noodle. A lunar disaster of this magnitude has never been so boring.
"Impact," which premieres June 21 at 8 p.m. and concludes June 28 on KTVX Channel 4, stars David James Elliott ("JAG") and Natasha Henstridge ("Species") as scientists who try to fix a problem with the moon hurling toward Earth. A brown dwarf, a tightly packed piece of material with immense gravity, lodges itself into the moon during a meteor storm, nudging the lunar body out of its orbit and toward Earth.
Another problem besides the obvious two planetoids crashing into each other is that the event
It's a catastrophic situation, which causes a lot of the world's best minds to get together in a secret room with a lot of cool big-screen monitors and speak in a lot of scientific jargon. In fact, for about three-quarters of the four-hour story, that's all they do. Exciting stuff, no doubt.
Coupled with all that technical mumbo-jumbo are some fairly banal personal moments, including a subplot with the great actor James Cromwell ("Babe") being grumpy to his grandchildren -- children of one of the scientists. There's also a hint of a romantic subplot, but it never develops.
Mostly, we're treated to hours of scientific speculation and countless theories of why events are occurring and what will happen next. Peppered throughout are just a few short disastrous events told in the cheapest of special effects that a 15-year-old can duplicate on his home Mac.
Our greatest fear isn't being smashed into smithereens by the moon, it's dying while sitting through four hours of complete monotony.
Vince Horiuchi can be reached at vince@sltrib.com or 801-257-8607. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
