Impact

My wife and I watched this to its end. We did so in the misplaced hope that it would get better and that surely it could not sink further. The acting is adequate. The casting is adequate. The photograpy, similarly, is adequate. But oh my. In a 'coffee-spurting-out-of-my-nose' manner, the plot is simply ludicrous and the errors were legion. Let's make a small list. a) Sextillion. I've never heard anyone use this word. If they mean 10 to the 21st power, why not say it? c) They had the concept of an orbit utterly wrong. Orbits aren't 'stable'; they're closed or they are not. If they're closed, they're an ellipse of some sort. d) The orbit must have the central body at its focus - not at its geometric centre. e) The term 'axis peak' is never used by anyone. Except in this movie. It doesn't mean anything. If you mean apogee, why not say it? Ap-oh-gee. It's not hard, really. f) If the gravitic anomalies affect larger objects but not smaller ones, why do the oceans and the atmosphere not fly up into the sky? We see a laden container ship floating out of the sea, why isn't the sea also sucked upward? Why isn't the air rushing past in an inverted tornado? g) Nobody has manipulated gravity through electromagnetic means - the 'hero' with a straight face says that he built a machine to levitate objects in this manner. Why was he not laughed at? h) The magic device that saves the day is designed to magnetize the Moon's core and repel the hypermass causing all the woe. Take two small magnets, hold them such that they have the same poles facing each other, and let them go. One magnet will spin violently and slam into the other. It will not be ejected into the Sun. i) The energy needed to flip this gazillion tonne mass out of the Moon has to come from somewhere. j) I've lost the will to type. The director should hang his head in shame. This was a very bad mini-series. I laughed at all the wrong places, I actually *wanted* the Moon to grind into the Earth so as to show the characters what utter bullshit their magical plans were. If they had tried to repel the moon with magic it would have been more coherent. My disbelief is easily suspended. But it has to be coherent and make sense within itself. This failed and as a result I couldn't care about the characters as they were spouting nonsense with straight faces.

After reading some other spoilers here, I was skeptical and I caught a couple of blown lines, like at the end when Alex tells Sergei, "We're not leaving anyone behind..." that was the greatest line screwup of the whole film since the mission commander just took an accelerated gravity fall over a cliff never to be seen again so sorry Alex, but yes you are leaving someone behind...nice marine line though...Semper Fi!!! Hoo-Ah! Still the screen writer said in the extras, he actually went to some actual astro-physicists to check the plausibility. Now here we have all these great scientific minds in reviewing her and I ask, have you ever fired a high powered rifle into the sand on a beach or your back yard or through an oak tree or an handgun unto a clay block to examine expansion damage? Same principle as your brown matter and the only brown matter any of you pseudo-scientists have come in close contact with in this life is while wiping your butt each daily dump. I can assure you, that a lead or a depleted uranium round will in fact stop at some point in the sand and not blow a hole to the earth's core, so take that smart guys! It's called suspension of disbelief and the term was coined a couple, few hundred years back and still hold true for movie enjoyment. And since we're all just having fun, Did you notice the rack on Natasha Henstridge. My god is she fine. I would have googled some bikini pictures of her a long time ago had I noticed that rocking body, but I don't watch television regularly...just movies and this isn't so bad and is actually kind of fun in spots. To all the "experts" here, you can tell us all how dense brown matter actually is after you wash it off your hands next time okay? A lot of space science is speculative and it changes constantly unlike some other areas of science. Theories come and go on a daily basis. Let's not pretend they are carved in stone.

What if the moon that we gaze upon at nights becomes the very cause of the last catastrophe to ever occur on earth before it finally ceases to exist? Impact tells of it and more. 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. I was wrong. Little did I know that it would deal with a remnant of a dead star hitting the moon instead. I got stuck to watching the movie at once as I got curious with this variation. Indeed, it was all worth it as the storyline started getting interesting by the minute. It did not occur to me that the writers and creators of the mini-series would be able to come up with such fascinatingly logical consequences to the featured occurrences. But that was not all. The different stories of the movie were made so simple and yet touching that its simplicity rightly balanced the overall movie impression and perfectly complemented the already complicated scientific events featured therein. Perhaps movies or mini-series should use similar complications matched with simple stories to make it as appealing as this movie. Be that as it may, Impact did not only highlight the impact of the so-called remnant of a dead star on the moon and the impact of the disturbed moon on the earth, requiring urgent action. More than that, it highlighted the impact of the overall happening on the lives of the different groups of people in the movie and on humanity as a whole. It tells of how a couple of kids who just recently lost their Mom cope with the loss of their remaining guardian, their grandfather and how they face the impending loss of their father to save others. It also tells of a very strong and understanding fiancée, who, despite the uncertainty of coming back alive, let go of her husband-to-be because she believed in him and his far-greater mission. Above all, it tells of two men, who upon being chosen to go to a one-way trip to accomplish a noble assignment, willingly let go of their respective attachments on this world, made sacrifices, and bravely faced dangers and even death for the sake of humanity. It's just fair for me to say that Impact could very well make an impact on the individual audience. And if you have not watched it, I would highly recommend it.

Honestly guys I have registered with this site, which I will probably never use again, just to stop anyone else wasting their time watching this total piece of inane rubbish. it has absolutely nothing good about it at all with the exception that is was quite well photographed for a TV film It is a typical piece of American melodrama with no finesse or anything else that gives it any justification to exist. America makes some great films, this is NOT one of them. I very much regret not reading any reviews before purchasing it, I have learned my lesson. Anyone who was involved in the making of this film should be very, very ashamed

As was already pointed out, a brown dwarf is a small star about 13 or more times the mass of Jupiter. A white dwarf is a collapsed object with very dense matter - they would not have been able to hoist a piece with a crane. They made the statement that the Moon used to have 1/6 the mass of the Earth - no! It was (is) 1/81 of the Earth's mass, or 0.0123 -- they mixed this up with the gravity being 1/6 that of the Earth. So on the Moon you would weigh 1/6 of what you weigh here. A piece of this degenerate matter would either go right through the Moon or the Earth or sink to the center of either body. The meteor shower is shown to stream in parallel lines in space to the Earth. Usually the meteors would actually seem to originate from a point in space, the radiant. This is like driving through a snow storm. But, to be fair, if the meteors are really coming from a nearby area, they might follow the paths shown. If the Moon was now twice the mass of the Earth then the Earth would be orbiting the Moon. There is a complex interaction of the Earth, Moon, and Sun and the spin axis, the length of the day, etc. will all be changing. Then they are shocked to see there may be a collision. You either have a stable orbit, or get flung away, or you crash. That's life with gravity. Another issue is the constant scenes of the Moon with a bunch of debris hovering around it - either the junk is orbiting or it will fall back down to the surface. 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. The gravity of the Moon could balance the Earth's gravity if it had the new mass and was closer. But they attribute this to some electric - magnetic effect. I could not understand the explanation - yes, we are all made of the same stuff, but obviously not everything is affected much by magnets. A white dwarf can have extreme magnetic fields, but you probably would die if it could lift you. Your bodily functions and cell growth would be messed up. The heart beat would be messed up, too.