Asteroid-a-Geddon (2020)

I've recently switched to Mastodon and started exploring on there following Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter and his attempts, seemingly, to alienate it's entire user base and drive the organisation into the ground faster than one of his failed relationships... but the point being that I was fairly new to the whole Mastodon experience and whilst I was browsing around for interesting accounts to follow I came across a bot that shares movies that are showing on Freeview channels and when and where e.t.c. And vicariously it has introduced me to a channel called GREAT! Movies which, from what I can ascertain, show anything but! But I am absolutely cool with that because instead they are pushing movies with titles like: "Ape Vs Monster", "Tornado Terror," and "Bermuda Tentacles". All movies which, to be honest with you would absolutely be at home on this blog and will probably show up at some point down the line... But one in particular has caught my attention and is the subject of this week's FTW feature: Asteroid-a-Geddon: "When a global scientific summit fail to take action regarding a massive asteroid hurtling toward Earth, a tech billionaire's daughter assembles her own team of specialists in the hopes of saving the world."  And if the title alone wasn't enough to seal the deal, the thumbnail features that douchebag from Wolves of Wall Street (Eric Roberts). A movie that I categorically hated.

Asteroid 2200QL is on a collision course with Earth! But in typical fashion all the big, important people at the official 2200QL Summit absolutely fail to make any progress on dealing with the matter. So it begins to cascade to private operations, more specifically Nikola Svoboda (Rick Williamson), an esteemed scientist but very unwell man, who believes he may be on to a solution to destroy the asteroid altogether. Meanwhile, the leader of the Divine Will Religious Cult, Malachi (Craig Gellis) pledges that he and his followers should do all they can to stop the interference of the asteroid crashing to Earth, believing it to be God's will... Nikola enlists the help of his until now estranged daughter Alexandria (Veronika Issa) to study and bring to him fragments of the asteroids smaller meteor fragments, striking Earth well ahead of the Asteroids final payload. After Alexandria and team survive some minor first impacts and manage to outrun the ensuing tsunami they analyse their data and opine that it will take an incredibly strong laser to burn the asteroid apart rather than a concentrated nuclear blast. Unfortunately by the time Alexandria and her crew make it back to America, Nikola has succumbed to his illness and passes away, but Alexandria steps into his shoes and picks up the project, confirming she will attend the 2200QL summit in his place. At the summit, after presenting her fathers plans to produce and outfit a spacecraft with a suitable laser, Alexandria is unable to convince the others that her proposal is the best way forward, largely due to her appearance and their lack of confidence in her owing to her young age, with the summit preferring instead to try a second nuclear warhead, despite the first one not really making that much difference... Alexandria and team instead press on with their own plans, without assistance, and after some initial tests narrow down the specifics they need in order to build a working version of the laser. Meanwhile, the Divine Will cult, who have been successful in disrupting the summits attempts to stop the asteroid, learn that Svoboda Enterprises, headed up by Alexandria, are working on a project to destroy 2200QL and turn their attention to learning more about them... The summit goes ahead with their plan to launch a second nuclear warhead but when it barely makes a scratch on the asteroid, they make the decision to have Alexandria back and actually listen to what she has to say this time...When the news reaches her though, Alexandria, still sore from how she was treated the first time around, decides that summit can "go screw themselves." and sets her team on continuing to work, despite the fact they are facing struggles of their own owing to cyber attacks from Divine Will. Alexandria drafts in an old ex-boyfriend who just so happens to be an IT expert who identifies that one of her team, Himari (Jennifer Lee Wiggins) has been purposely sabotaging the teams efforts from inside. She has a good whinge about Alexandria and her dad and then bitches about feeling unappreciated e.t.c before she reveals she was won over by Divine Will and that she believes the asteroid is gods will e.t.c before she gets escorted off the premises. Securing the help of a private... supplier of spaceships I guess... Alexandria and team go live with their first laser launch and as all proceeds according to plan, the team suddenly suffer a cyber attack curtesy of Divine Will, but are able to overcome it thanks to some foresight from Alexandria's old boyfriend. They get their servers back online and commence with the lasering. Initially despite a few hiccups the laser does it's job and the team begin carving the asteroid apart, but when Alexandria tries to push things too far, the laser eventually fails before it's finished it's job before exploding in a ball of fire. With less than 3 days to go before the asteroid impact, the 2200QL summit is dissolved and the order is given to begin evacuation and relocation plans. Back at Svoboda Enterprises the team hatch a plan to use a backup laser from Earth, which accounting for the risks involved with that, requires them to be in the middle of the desert (there's a lot of exposition but just go with it). They get to work on making the laser thing do it's job, but in doing so, and documenting it on... get this; Twitter of all places!! They accidentally reveal their location to Malachi and the Divine Will. He promptly trucks his way over there and arrives just in time for Alexandria and team to have activated the laser. He tries to meddle but his efforts are in vain as the laser vaporises the asteroid and then for good measure he gets his ass decked by a - proficient in kickboxing - Alexandria. In the closing scene there is some heavy handed reference to physical appearances being deceiving and refusing to take the sole credit for stopping the asteroid, like maybe her father would have done, Alexandria makes sure her whole team are recognized.

Incredible that my opening gambit about Twitter ended up working into a minor plot point of this movie! I genuinely did not plan that from the beginning, promise! But uh yeah, apart from that this was not really that good unfortunately. Exposition. And lots of it. Lots of big, meaningless words, lots of nonsensical tech jargon, lots of Alexandria barking orders at the other members of her team and being really bossy. For a movie about a massive asteroid striking the Earth, there isn't really much that elaborates on the consequences of that... or the panic it might be causing? Nope. Instead let's just really hyperfocus on this team of people trying to formulate a plan to stop it. It was like a heavily diluted version of The Imitation Game... only set years in the future from that... and about a tenth as good.

Eric Roberts didn't quite feature as prominently in this as some of the other movies I've seen him in, so he didn't really get to play out his douchebaggeryness in this one. That's either a shame or a blessing depending on where you stand on that really I guess... but unfortunately the rest of the acting was all pretty average. Veronikia Issa did an ok job as Alexandria but at times I felt like she was really playing up for the part a little bit more than maybe normal. She was just far too short and snappy with some of her dialogue and as a result, the intended character transformation just felt kinda flat and failed. Unfortunately nobody else particularly stood out as noteworthy save for maybe Isaac J. Cruz as Hugo, one of Alexandria's team. He at least felt like he had a bit of character beyond just being a weedy, geeky stereotype. But only just barely.

In terms of storyline, as aforementioned, it was largely just a focus on Alexandria and her four team members as they grappled with interference and set backs from completing their project. And there was far too much exposition and paragraphs of dialogue with nonsense tech jargon that it just got really stale and really boring pretty quickly. When that wasn't happening, it was mostly just Alexandria barking orders at the rest of the team and there was very little in terms of content aside from that. Save for occassional cut aways to the summit and to Malachi and his cult trying to bring some kind of edge and plot to the rest of this snoozefest. It didn't quite collapse into a completely uncomfortable, unwatchable borefest but there was a good few moments where I just felt like I had completely no interest in what was going on because it was the same old back and forth dialogue exchange peppered with techy big words that meant nothing and made no sense.

Special Effects though, accounting for this being a fairly modern film, were pretty decent! The space scenes genuinely looked like space scenes, they were a bit maybe too hyper-realistic in spots and the massive asteroid did look a little bit unrealistic but they were otherwise mostly pretty good. The space shuttles and the space craft looked like real, actual things. And similarly the meteor impacts whenever there was meteor showers on Earth looked mostly real enough as well. Often with these low budget movies this is where they massively fall down, but I honestly thought they did ok here.

Similarly the cinematography was, for the most part, pretty decent. There was some good use of some more interesting framing and angles for a couple of the scenes that at least made it feel like a semi-professionally shot movie. At the same time there was some occassional odd choices and odd framing decisions that bemoan these low budget movies, but for the large part, everything was shot pretty decently. Even some of the more challenging scenes like the driving away from the tsunami. Given that most of the movie was basically 4 people in a building shouting at each other, to keep it semi-interesting visually was quite a challenge.

And I think it's on that point that I sort of need to go back to the acting a bit. Because it was basically just 4 people spouting made up words about techy stuff, there was often moments where the actors were just sort of mulling around pretending to look really busy and it massively felt really amateurish. You know in movies when someone is "hacking in" to a computer and they do all this massively over the top stuff to make it look intense? Well there was quite a bit of that here. And it just is a bit cringe to be honest. The movie was already struggling to hold my attention at times and that just did it no favours.

And I haven't even really touched on the more weird sub-tone to the movie; Alexandria is cast as this "bohemian" "hippy" "vegan" kind of character with piercings and tattoos and because of that her opinion on these deep and technical scientific matters can't be taken seriously. And I didn't quite get it... she didn't look that alternative... and I don't really think that that's even really a thing that happens any more? Not in 2020, not in 2023? We have like, moved on from that right? I just didn't quite see it here. And there is some heavy handed metaphors about acknowledging the contributions from the people around you and not taking all the credit yourself? But they aren't really explored and fleshed out in enough detail for me to really, credibly, understand what they were trying to portray.

So yeah disappointing really that a movie called "Asteroid-a-Geddon" wasn't quite as ridiculously over the top going in as I thought it was going to be. They might as well have called it "The Asteroid Game" and really play up to the hamfisted comparisons I tried to make earlier with The Imitation Game. That's the vibe I was getting though, and there is unfortunately a distinct lack of action to go with this one and not enough character depth from the other ensemble of characters to make it even halfway as interesting as it is to watch The Imitation Game. Some decent special effects and cinematography but unfortunately not enough to really save this movie from being a bit bland and boring. Slightly cringe at times as well really with the whole "we underestimated your physical appearance!" crap. Not a particularly bad movie as such this one, but not one I particularly enjoyed either. Weak 2 out of 5?