DARK STORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 11/15/10

 

After watching EARTHSTORM with Stephen Baldwin, I thought to myself, "Wow, I sure would like to see another cheapo Canadian ARMAGEDDON-inspired Stephen Baldwin sci-fi movie with the word 'storm' in the title." 

Well, the good folks at the SyFy Channel and Lionsgate must've heard me, because sure enough, here's DARK STORM (2006), a cheapo Stephen Baldwin sci-fi movie made in Canada with the tagline "Armageddon is on the horizon."  Yay...

At least Stephen Baldwin fit the part of a building-demolition expert in EARTHSTORM.  Here, he plays a scientist named Daniel Gray who's part of a secret government project to collect dark matter in space.  (I'm not quite sure what "dark matter" is, but it's one of those neat things like wormholes that you don't really have to understand in order for it to be a cool subject for a sci-fi flick.)  Seeing Stephen Baldwin in a lab coat is like seeing a gorilla wearing a tutu--somehow, the two just don't go together.  I kept expecting his associate Dr. Fred Flintstone to show up at some point so they could sneak out and go bowling together.

Anyway, this project is supposedly being done to benefit Mankind somehow, but the weaselly guy in charge of it, Dr. McKray (Gardiner Millar), turns out to be a dirty rat who's planning to turn the whole thing into a deadly weapon and sell it to the highest international bidder.  While demonstrating it to the visiting General Killion (William B. Davis, better known as Cancer Man from "The X-Files"), who controls the government purse-strings that finance the project, a containment leak in the orbiting dark-matter-collecting satellite is detected and a cloud of dark matter is spreading over the atmosphere.  (Sorry, but I'm just going to have to keep saying "dark matter" a bunch of times during this review.)
 

Dr. McKray doesn't want to lose his funding so he forces the reticent Dr. Baldwin and his coworkers to ignore safety measures and proceed with the demonstration, which causes the dark matter to enter our atmosphere at different points known as "spikes", wreaking all sorts of havoc with the weather and disintegrating airplanes and buildings and stuff.  This is done using that TV-quality kind of CGI that looks pretty good in some scenes and so hot at all in others.

Not only that, but Dr. Baldwin gets exposed to some errant dark matter himself during the botched test, which gives him strange super-powers that enable him to start his car without keys, lob dark-matter fastballs at bad guys, and repel focused beams of destructive dark matter with his mind.  He's Dark Matter Man!  This, too, turns out to be part of the repulsive Dr. McKray's plan to turn himself and everyone else into a race of dark-matter superbeings in order to bring Mankind's evolutionary process to its ultimate peak.  Wow--sounds just crazy enough to work!

It's interesting seeing William B. Davis as a good guy for a change, but without those fake cigarettes he used to chain-smoke on "The X-Files" he doesn't really know what to do with his hands anymore.  Camille Sullivan (THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT), who looks and sounds a bit like Sarah Jessica Parker but I didn't hold it against her, is okay as Dr. Baldwin's wife Ellie, and Keegan Connor Tracy (WHITE NOISE, FINAL DESTINATION 2) does a fairly good job playing the nasty agent of an unnamed government bidding for the dark-matter weapon.  I liked Rob LaBelle (FIDO, "Taken") as Dr. Baldwin's dorky associate Andy--he reminded me of a skinnier, shorter-haired Larry from the Three Stooges. 

Some of the dark-matter storm scenes are pretty cool but there are just enough shots of calamity and destruction, with varying degrees of cartoony-ness, to remind us that this is going on while the talkier, less-expensive scenes take up more running time.  Dr. McKray eventually has Dr. and Mrs. Baldwin kidnapped and taken to his secret dark-matter destructo-beam installation, and it's up to them to find a way to foil his evil scheme.  It all builds to a final super-powered showdown, with predictable results.

I liked EARTHSTORM better because its "Buck Rogers"-type space shuttle mission and other cheesy sci-fi elements were brighter and more fun.  DARK STORM, which is darker, more earthbound, and  a bit dreary at times, is a fairly entertaining time-waster and I didn't hate it, but that's about it.  

DARK STORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

EARTHSTORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 10/17/10

 

I really like imminent-doom-from-space movies like ARMAGEDDON, DEEP IMPACT, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, and their directionally-inverted counterpart, THE CORE.  The makers of EARTHSTORM (2006) obviously like them, too, because their movie is very similar to these in several ways except a very obvious one: budget.  It's an epic disaster flick scaled down to barely the size of a Sci-Fi Channel movie (which, in fact, it is), with most of the drama taking place in--as Paul's very clean grandad from A HARD DAY'S NIGHT might have put it--a cheap CGI shot and a room, a barebones space shuttle interior and a room, and a room and a room.

After a title sequence that resembles the opening of "Star Trek:The Next Generation", the movie kicks off with the moon being struck by a huge asteroid.  Not only does this send a shower of huge meteorites raining down upon the Earth, but it also causes a gradually-widening crack that threatens to break the moon itself into pieces.  Worldwide weather chaos ensues as well, and we get to see the usual idiot newsguys standing in the middle of it as they breathlessly give us the play-by-play.  The CGI in the "meteors hit city" scenes is okay--not great, but not actually laughable, either.  It's a small-scale disaster, to be sure, but if you scale down your expectations to match, then it's not so bad.

Scientist Lara Gale (Amy Price-Francis) is summoned to the ASI, or "American Space Institute" (which is the equivalent of NASA in the alternate dimension in which this story seems to take place), by her colleague Dr. Garth Pender (John Ralston), to help whip up some kind of solution to the problem.  Lara's late father predicted that this scenario might someday occur and came up with his own theoretical remedy, based on his belief that the interior of the moon was composed mainly of iron.  This, however, was ridiculed by his peers in the scientific community, including the President's current Chief Scientific Advisor, Victor Stevens (Dirk Benedict), one of those characters whose sole purpose is to arbitrarily laugh off all the rational solutions proposed by our heroes and insist on doing things the stupid way.  Benedict, who was Starbuck on the original "Battlestar Galactica" and Face on "The A-Team", is used to playing stupid characters and does a pretty good job here.

The plan, as it is, consists of sending astronauts to the moon to blow up some nukes and cause the crack to collapse in upon itself.  In ARMAGEDDON, the fate of mankind rested on the world's greatest oil driller.  Here, it requires the expertise of ace building-blower-upper John Redding (Stephen Baldwin), who just happens to be the world's greatest demolition expert.  He gets summoned to ASI headquarters, and we just know that before you can say "Press the button, Stamper!", he's gonna end up having to go into space himself to make sure the job gets done right.  Upon hearing the plan, he protests, "I don't know anything about the moon!" to which Dr. Pender responds, "Nobody knows more about how things collapse in on themselves than you."  Well, you can't argue with that.

After a bunch of scenes consisting of people in rooms talking to each other, with a few "ehh" disaster shots thrown in here and there, we get to the film's most gripping sequence: the launch of the shuttle during a furious tropical storm.  With time running out and no backup plan, Redding and the two shuttle pilots must go for broke and take off even as various systems hover in and out of "no-go" status and the storm rages around them.  Things also get pretty tense during the shuttle's approach to the moon through a dense field of debris.  By this time, I wasn't expecting ILM-level effects, so I found these scenes visually adequate.  What sorta had me scratching my head, though, was the fact that they seem to have gravity on board the shuttle.  I guess you just can't simulate having a big lug like Stephen Baldwin floating around weightless without spending some serious cash.

Speaking of which, these Baldwin brothers really are a bunch of big lugs, aren't they?  Don't get me wrong--I like them.  But they look like the kind of guys you'd see hanging out at a Flintstone family reunion.  Alec used to be the slim, handsome one--his "Flintstones" character would probably be a movie star named "Rock Granite" or something--and Stephen was the lanky, kid-brother one.  Daniel, the middle Baldwin, was the original "big lug" type of the three.  Now, they're all starting to look more and more alike as Alec and Stephen's physical appearance begins to move closer toward the middle ground inhabited by Daniel.  A time-lapse montage of close-ups from their movies, in chronological order, would probably look like one of those transformation scenes in THE WOLF MAN.  One of these days we won't even be able to tell them apart, and they'll be able to star in an all-Baldwin remake of WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH.

Anyway, once Redding and the astronauts reach the moon, they discover that the nuke plan isn't going to work and that an alternate plan based on the theories of Dr. Gale's late father must be improvised (which will vindicate the old guy at last).  Take that, you dumb old President's Chief Science Advisor!  This leads to a sequence similar to one in APOLLO 13 in which the eggheads at mission control must devise a way to utilize only the equipment and resources available on board the shuttle to conquer the problem.  And a certain level of suspense is maintained as the shuttle is bombarded by debris while the clock ticks down to the point beyond which it will be too late to save the Earth. 

Stephen Baldwin does a good job and is likable in his Barney Rubble kind of way.  The supporting players are good, particularly Matt Gordon as "Albert", one of the eggheads running around mission control like a chicken with its head cut off, and Richard Leacock as "Ollie", the mission control guy who wants to abort the shuttle liftoff.  I also liked Redding's building-demolition helper, Bryna (Anna Silk).  She's very appealing in a "girl-next-door" kind of way.  Does Bryna get together with Redding in the end, like I wanted?  I'll put it this way--no.  GRRRRRRRR!!!  The final romantic pair-ups in this movie are infuriatingly wrong, and made me want to smash the DVD into little pieces, mix it with mashed potatoes and gravy, and eat it, thus symbolizing my total victory over this film and everyone involved. 

But on further reflection, I decided that such a course of action would probably be overdoing it a bit.  After all, EARTHSTORM is just a low-rent sci-fi actioner that is fairly entertaining if you catch it in the right mood, and it's not going to kill me if it doesn't end exactly the way I wanted it to.  But Stephen Baldwin's character and Amy Price-Francis' character ending up together?  Pffft--never gonna work.  Just wait'll she sees how much hair this guy's gonna leave in the tub every time he takes a shower.

EARTHSTORM -- Movie Review by Porfle