Meltdown: Days of Destruction (2006)

Just perfect...

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

As a movie made for TV, Meltdown isn't a complete dismal failure, but even with the minimal budget, barely any actors with ability and a ridiculous premise I still expected it to at least make some kind of sense. Annoyingly this starts out OK; a large asteroid is hurtling towards earth and an agency has set up an orbiting 10 megaton warhead as a countermeasure for just this type of thing. One of the operators notices an anomaly and wants to abort but he's told to proceed as normal. The warhead is fired, hits its target but fails to destroy the object. Instead it breaks into 3 large pieces. The largest piece, which we're advised is the size of Iceland, is set to collide with earth. Instead of creating the extinction level event that's expected, the piece hits earth's atmosphere and bounces off, however the impact has managed to jolt the earth out of orbit, (yes you read that right), and it's predicted that over the coming week the temperatures will increase to around 150 degrees Fahrenheit or 65 degrees Celsius. As the earth starts to fry in the sudden global heatwave, fires break out in various parts of the world, water is in short supply, widespread lootings are afoot and police detective, Casper Van Dien, along with his family, set off for the airport in the hope of reaching the Arctic. The rest of the movie is a random mix of events that plague their attempts to get any respite from the soaring temperatures. Needless to say, they never make it to a plane and therefore, never get to the Arctic, but for some reason, certain doom is avoided by way of magnetic pull from planetary alignment, or some such rubbish, the earth manages to sort itself out, rain cools everything down, I puke, the end. To say that this movie doesn't make sense and falls completely off the rails is a vast understatement. Despite the highly questionable and implausible science, the actions of all concerned just don't make any logical sense. One of the characters, who happens to be the technician who was against firing the nuke in the first place is carrying a portable temperature reader and even though it's readings are increasing and around 140 degrees, everyone is still wearing jackets or long sleeves, no one is wearing a hat, only one person passes out even though none of them have had the water necessary to continue and none of them appear to be sweating all that much. It's hot enough to cause cars to overheat and spontaneously combust but not hot enough for anyone to roll up their sleeves or discard their jackets apparently. Forest fires make sense, looting and rioting and killing for water also makes sense, but at 60 degrees Celsius there's going to be very little running or fighting going on as it'd be virtually impossible to breathe adequately by this time for that type of action, clothing would be at a minimum and the group would've died from heatstroke or organ failure 5-10 degrees earlier from being out in the open. There'd be widespread flooding from icemelt, all permafrost would be in thaw and with no water pressure left to fight fires, that would make ground temperature even hotter. All of that however is moot, seeing as any object large enough to knock earth from orbit would also destroy the earth on impact, but if that happened we wouldn't have a bad movie to laugh at. Budget constraints shouldn't be an excuse to forgo the simple research that would at least make movies like this more enjoyable and slightly more logical in its progression even if the chain of events that caused it are impossible. This'll be OK for a late night movie on TV, but it isn't worth going out of your way for.

Honestly, this wasn't a bad movie. The characters were likable and engaging.The relationships were plausible and compelling. The idea of the world's population struggling together seems very real. However, the premise is that the world is overheating (as the title alludes to) yet nearly all the characters in the movie were wearing such items as a long sleeved shirts, sweat shirts, long pants, a hooded sweat jacket, and even a winter coat. They wore this attire for nearly the entire movie..even though the world is baking. If you want the audience to believe the world is heating up at a rapid clip..don't you think the characters should dress for extreme heat? I couldn't take the movie seriously because of the wardrobes. It made me giggle through the whole thing. Just my two cents. :)

MELTDOWN: DAYS OF DESTRUCTION, a would-be TV disaster movie from 2006, is only worth watching if you're wondering what happened to Casper Van Dien's career after STARSHIP TROOPERS (answer: not a lot). It's essentially a heatwave-based thriller, featuring some science guff about an asteroid passing close to the Earth causing our planet to move closer to the sun.What it all boils down to is a kind of road/post-apocalypse movie, as Van Dien and his colleagues/friends and family are forced to try to get to a place of safety while contending with intense temperatures. Strangely, despite the supposed heatwave, most of the characters continue to wear long shirts and/or jackets - at least the cult '60s flick NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT made the effort of making the protagonists look all sweaty and dishevelled! Given the poverty-row budget, most of the threat comes from various looters and bad guys, and it's all done in a gung ho fashion and fairly well paced. But the writing is predictable and the characters non-existent, with none of the cast making much of an impact. About the only scene in the film I enjoyed was the bit with the exploding cars, which was novel; the rest is merely humdrum.

MELTDOWN is pretty interesting SCI-FI. No major budget, very few special effects; but decent acting and a storyline of global doom is enough to sustain viewing. An asteroid grazes the atmosphere and thrust the Earth into an orbit closer to the sun. Global warming rapidly becomes unbearable. A determined LAPD cop(Casper Van Dien)goes all out to save the world from certain annihilation as the rising temps are devastating. The pressure is on to save mankind from this solar catastrophe; as well as protect his daughter, nurse ex-wife and TV reporter girlfriend. The cast includes: Stefanie Von Pfetten, Venus Terzo, Amanda Crew and Vincent Gale.