Post Impact (2004)

Pretty Good

One of my all time favorites.

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

(as they were known before their spell checker stopped working).Don't understand the venom here. The movie isn't great, but it isn't terrible either; don't know the preferences of the other reviewers but I would watch movies like this before crap like Hostel or another remake of a 70s movie that wasn't that good the first time.Post-Impact is a mid-Europe production crew making a movie with an interesting premise; a comet strike renders northern Europe uninhabitable. After a rescue mission is destroyed by a microwave satellite controlled from the impact zone, a team moves in to discover the truth. The source is found, and it turns out not everyone on the team is working with the same agenda.Yes, there are Euro-accents all over the place, the equipment is wrong, wrong, wrong (the .22 inserts on the M16s, and, well, pretty much everything about the military and government aspects). Sometimes it sounds like Hanz und Franz from SNL wrote and directed an action movie. But it's a interesting premise, Dean Cain hits the marks and says the lines and it brings an interesting setting into your living room. Some characters have good turns.No, it's not great. Nevertheless, I find SciFi (no, I'm not going to write Syfy, because I am not Hooked on Phonics) movies more interesting than 99% of the crap and recycled garbage that comes out of the big entertainment houses these days.No, really. No matter how bad the acting, how laughable the special effects, SciFi movies nearly always have a gem (sometimes a very tiny gem) in there, a premise or a characters or a setting which transcends the Robert McKee/focus-group fueled McMovies. Yes, you have to reach pretty deep into some of those things to pull out the diamond but it's nearly always there, and it's there in Post-Impact. Look for it.

When I saw the title, I thought "oh cool, a movie about attempting to survive the end of the world." I tried to ignore the poor reviews. I tried to ignore the fact that the impact occurred within the first 10 minutes, with no character or plot development. But it's only 20 minutes in and I want to gouge my eyes and ears out. I'm sure it's not the fault of the actors and actresses in the movie. This script is just horrible. Where is the character background? Where is the the setting? Where is the plot? Why do the overly emo former army captain and the overly aggressive army colonel hate each other? I take back what I said before about the actors and actresses as well. SOME of them are okay. The rest just plain suck. I wasted 20 minutes on this movie. I'm not wasting another hour and forty minutes.

The concept was just about all that was worthwhile, and many others have done it much better. I felt sorry for Dean Cain as he tries to make this whole thing believable. The script seems to have been written by a high school drama class. I waited and waited to make something worthwhile happen in this story, but after awhile I just gave up and fell asleep in my chair. Was this written in German and was translated by an inept scribe? The special effects might have looked good if it had been carried out correctly, but maybe I'm just jaded. In summary, this is one of the movie-of-the-week never-was attempt at cashing in on movies like The Day After, which at least had world-class SFX.

This movie starts off with a decent premise: a meteor has hit the Earth in Europe and cast the world into a perpetual winter.The Northern Hemisphere is in an ice age and the equatorial areas are in a state of perpetual gloom and rain. Three years after the event, its determined that someone is controlling a satellite that has the capacity to destroy what remains of the Earth's population. A "crack" team is sent in to the impact zone in Germany to determine where the signals controlling the satellite are originating.So far so good, right? Wrong.The producers of this movie decided to destroy the promise of this movie by inserting terrible dialog, huge and obvious plot holes, glaring continuity errors, and so many logical and factual inconsistencies that the movie makes your head spin.Plot changes occur without any rhyme or reason; its as if they fired and hired writers but had already shot the scenes from the original writer and decided to leave it in the film.Heres a few clunkers: When the team is initially inserted via a special cargo plane carrying some weird airborne tank thingy, there appears to be about 8 crewmembers including the 4 main characters, but as they run into difficulties later in the movie, there always seems to be a couple extras who magically appear to be shot or garroted from behind, etc.When they meet with the subterranean denizens of Berlin, they all speak English, and are relatively unconcerned by this arrival of the first outsiders in three years. They are all wearing spiffy new ski jackets, yet burning trash in barrels like a bunch of Bowery bums.Dean Cains character takes several shots from a 9mm glock, yet is able to engage in hand-to-hand combat, and avoid falling from a catwalk by hanging on with one arm. During the same scene, he applies a tourniquet to his arm, (the same one he uses to dangle from the catwalk) and it disappears just before his second fight with "The Bitch who Wouldn't Die".Later, we see Cain in the closing shots wearing the same parka, which has miraculously had its bullet holes and bloodstains removed.All in all, I can only recommend this film to film students as a caution on how not to make a movie.