Impact

When I see a damaged moon in the sky, I think of two things. One is the broken moon of Thundarr, the Barbarian. The other is Chairface Chippendale from The Tick. There were several moments during Impact when Amy or I leaned over to the other and said simply, CHA.

This movie could have been a tight 78-minute thriller, but instead was a 180-minute bloatfest. I know that it was originally made as a TV miniseries and repackaged into a movie, but that’s no excuse. It races through the plot points and then lingers, ghoulishly, on every possible emotional note. It takes longer, in screen time, for grandpa to have a heart attack and die, grandkids crying beside him, antagonistic stranger watching and feeling awkward, than the entire climactic action sequence on the moon that determines whether humanity lives or dies.

There is also a lot of gendered nonsense. The young boy can identify craters on the moon, and the young girl wants to see “the man in the moon” through the telescope. Dr Maddie Rhodes (Natasha Henstridge, doing her best with the material she’s given) is purportedly a subject-matter-expert and the head of the special team put together by the President. But in practice, all the men on her team lecture her about what science is — and come up with the actual ideas and do the planning. “Let’s get some men in here to do the real science,” is somehow not an actual line of dialogue. This movie feels like it was an audition script for a writer who desperately wanted to write Hallmark movies. And I mean that in the most by-the-numbers way possible.

The movie starts with all thirty-seven main characters watching a meteor shower. This is an exaggeration, but only barely. Oh no! Behind the meteors was an asteroid, lurking undetected. It crashes into the moon and sends flaming moon bits to sprinkle destruction across the planet. The moon stabilizes in a new orbit. Mass panic is averted. Thank goodness it’s over.

It’s not over! There are weird static electricity surges. A meteorite hunter (and we learn later, the Globally Recognized Subject-Matter-Expert on The Moon) finds a piece of the object that hit the moon. It’s heavy. It’s magnetic. The moon moves again, but has stabilized in its newer, more eccentric, orbit. Mass panic is averted. Thank goodness it’s over.

It’s not over! It turns out the object that crashed into the moon — and apparently lodged there — was a fragment of a brown dwarf star with a mass twice that of earth. More electrical mayhem occurs as well as some brief moments of reduced gravity when the moon is at perigee. Note that none of the actual scientists ever use this word, which means “the point where a satellite is closest to the earth.” Mass panic is averted. Thank goodness it’s over.

It’s not over! The moon moves yet again, stabilizing into a newer, sexier orbit. Although “stabilize” turns out to be the incorrect verb once the team analyzes the data. In fact, the moon is now going to crash into the earth in 40 days (although one could pedantically note that as the less massive object, it’s really the earth crashing into the moon – but no one ever does).

Many gravitational shenanigans occur, putting side characters into danger. Meteorite Hunter’s pregnant fiancée is on a train that goes parabolically into the sky. Primary Male Scientist’s kids and father-in-law try to drive to DC and their car also goes into the air.

These alternate with non-gravitational shenanigans, such as Dr Maddie Rhodes’ sleazy journalist ex-husband showing up in the movie just long enough to leak the whole “moon crashing into the earth” bit to the news. Mass panic is not so much averted.

The heroes present the President with their plan, but the military has an alternate plan. The President goes with the military’s plan (the classic “NUKE THE MOON”). It doesn’t work. Now the dramatic tension is heightened, since the timeline is constricted, and our heroes must come up with a new plan, as there is no longer time to implement their original plan.

The new plan involves an experimental anti-gravity machine and a missile fired down into the crevasses of the moon. The intent is the controlled yeeting of the brown dwarf fragment into a different solar orbit than ours. Although my explanation here is more technical and scientifically accurate than anything anyone says in this movie.

All the while, they’re yanking at the heart strings with moments of (to quote Amy) “cloying forced sentimentality,” and enabling us to test our eye rolling muscles … and our gag reflexes.

In fact, there were so many moments that made us want to gag — given that the movie begins with pieces of the moon crashing down to earth — we started calling it Seven Heaves.

…but to be honest, there were way more than seven heave-worthy moments.