Stonehenge Apocalypse (2010)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Blistering performances.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I was drawn to this film, or at least my girlfriend was, upon seeing that Misha Collins was in it - she loves him in 'Supernatural' and has practically converted me into a fan too. But how would he stand up by himself, without those Winchester boys and Crowley to support him? The answer is, not that bad actually. This is your typical low budget Sy-Fy film which uses CGI to drive a usually weak plot forward. A group of scientists unearth a skeleton and a piece of machinery near Stonehenge. They accidentally trigger a countdown to the apocalypse, potentially dooming all of mankind. Collins plays Jacob, a misunderstood scientist trying to save everything. In truth he plays it in a very Castiel tongue in cheek way (just without the wings and grace). Torri Higginson plays Kaycee who delivers in an unoffensive manner, much like the rest of the cast, there aren't many moments when the acting is cheesy - it's more a case that they do their best without over or under acting. There were blatant plot holes and gaffes galore, the CGI was shockingly bad at times and it was obviously filmed in America rather than anywhere near England. It feels more like a low budget student film rather than your usual Sy-Fy trash, which actually surprised me. I watch a lot of rubbish films and I expected this to be one of those, but in truth it was slightly classier than some of the other rubbish I watch. It's got a little bit of action, a little pace, and enough of a plot and script to keep me entertained. For this reason I'm giving it a 5 out of 10 - not offensive rubbish that I'd avoid, but likewise not a noteworthy addition to the cinematographic world.

While this is a fairly typical doomsday device movie, it's well executed. There are a minimum of black and white characters, with even the American guns-blazing general having moral ambiguities. It's not hard to predict which characters will die and when, but I found myself rooting for them anyway. The one kind of surprising twist is that the hero doesn't get the girl in the end, because he doesn't survive. Many disaster movies pull even more of a deus ex machina that they would have to otherwise in order for the hero to live through the disaster, but this movie is aware enough of reality that the hero doesn't survive multiple gunshot wounds and probably a buttload of radiation and/or a massive electromagnetic pulse. I approve.

I watched this because I had run out of things to watch and it had a funny review on another site. It actually has a fairly good story line, if only there was more money for it, it would have been good.One thing that is a little confusing is that they are at Stonehenge, which actually does not look like Stonehenge and they are meant to be in England but all the English scientists and the English army are all have American accents and have American syntax. But what confused me is that occasionally they were drinking tea - so they must have been English. But then they were drinking tea from glass mugs, so maybe they weren't.I am confused.It is well worth a watch!

Just to get this straight, I have absolutely nothing against Syfy Originals in general. Mostly, they're refreshingly irony-free throwbacks to classic drive-in b-movies and those giant monster flicks that Hollywood and independent studios alike tend to neglect. This one, however, was quite different, and not necessarily for the best.I guess my biggest issue, aside from the absolutely worthless protagonist, was the presentation of the story. An amazingly large part of the movie consists of very little more than a group of scientists *observing* the actual location of interest via monitors and meters. They analyze the data and discuss the mysterious threat that's supposed to be rising by the minute with as much melodrama as possible, but the fact remains that all we see is people *talking* about a dangerous situation from a safe distance. It hampers the sense of tension that's needed for a "Countdown to Doomsday" movie to work. It's not necessarily boring as much as it feels like a distraction from what *should* be the real focus, namely the actual sites of the strange phenomena. There are exceptions, of course; some of the later action scenes and special effects sequences really are pretty well executed for a TV movie, but they're only a minuscule portion of the whole.All in all, "Stonehenge Apocalypse" is one of the weaker Syfy Originals I've seen. It's undeniably much more coherent and serious than many of the others, but it thoroughly lacks true excitement and tension. The fact that most of its major plot devices are mere references to established real world pseudo-sciences, inelegantly thrown in there like quotes from their respective Wikipedia articles, certainly doesn't help.