Join date : 2010-02-15 Age : 44 Location : land of broken dreams
Subject: Ultimate Limit Tue Mar 23, 2010 2:28 pm
Well, 2012:Doomsday wasn’t the only disaster film () I picked up from that discount DVD store, another title was the TV movie and direct-to-DVD release Ultimate Limit, released in the States as ‘Deadly Skies’.
This, released in 2005, film is clearly written to try to cash in on Deep Impact and Armageddon, which were both released in 1998... So it tried to jump on the bandwagon, but the bandwagon left several years earlier so this movie just threw itself on the mud-tracks that those films left behind...
What I’m trying to say here is that this film is worse than Armageddon.
I’ll just let that sink in for a moment...
Ready?
I’m not, I’m out of booze...
Oh well, here we go!
We open with my old friend: Full Screen Captions:
Quote :
Thursday, 9.47am Val d’Annivers, Switzerland
A French bloke drives a car which runs out of fuel... He grabs a spare tank from his boot and wanders off, muttering “Merde” to himself. His car explodes.
I wonder why a Swiss is speaking French, but I suppose it’s not totally implausible... Another full screen caption:
Quote :
Thursday, 3.20 pm Serengeti Plains, Africa
Giraffe...
Giraffe...
Giraffe...
*Checks watch...*
Giraffe...
Giraffe...
Hello? Movie? Wake up!
Oh! Shitty Photoshop effect!
Then another caption...
Quote :
Thursday, 10.03 pm Mojave Desert, California
Cactus...
Cactus...
Oh shit, not this again...
Oh! The Photoshop effect kicked in early this time!
And onto the opening credits.
The credits roll as we see a terrible CGI effect of an asteroid tumbling through space... And then we see a shooting star... And later, we see another one...
We see shooting stars from Earth, because they’re bits of rock burning in our atmosphere... You would not see the same effect in space... This movie is really gonna hurt me with its dumb, isn’t it? 3 mins in, the credits haven’t finished rolling...
Why is it that asteroids always take the scenic route through the Solar System? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an asteroid movie where the villainous rock hasn’t taken its sweet time and visited every planet along the way...
Not to mention that two of the planets it visits are Jupiter and Saturn, and it passes close enough to them to intercept their moon orbits... And the asteroid keeps going in a straight line, because...?
When the credits end we get another full-screen caption:
Quote :
Friday, 10.05 am Washington D.C.
Shortly followed by a few shots of the Whitehouse and the Washington Monument. Gee, movie, I sure am glad you told me that I’m in Washington... I’d have never figured that out...
Eventually we get to the N.E.A.T.S. Observatory... This looks like a broadcasting house to me... N.E.A.T.S. apparently stands for “Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Society”.
There we learn that the three impacts we witnessed can all be tracked back to a larger asteroid called Rockenbach 10-31...
Quote :
That asteroid is the size of Texas...
Says our pretty female lead... Taking the asteroid size straight out of Armageddon...
We are informed that it won’t hit us... but it will arrive Saturday night, coming almost as close as the moon.
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Jesus... This close to a global threat and we find out about it one day in advance...
There arn’t enough facepalms...
Now... Seeing as though this asteroid is the size of Texas, making it roughly 1400 kilometres across, and it will pass us in less than 24 hours... this would mean that by now IT WOULD BE VISIABLE TO THE NAKED EYE IN DAYLIGHT!!!
There is no way... no way that something that big would have sneaked up to us unnoticed...
Armageddon did the same thing... I’ll quote Phil Plait as he talks about a similar claim in that film from his awesome science-y review of it:
[Edit: heh... I just noticed the details of that web address! ]
Quote :
Let's see. Let's say our killer asteroid is the same size as Ceres (remember, 900 km across). The movie says it is moving at 22,000 miles per hour (not metric, of course!), and is 18 days away. That puts it about ten million miles away, or 40 times the Moon's distance. At that distance it is 30 times closer than Ceres. Ceres itself is just barely too faint to seen by the naked eye, but if it were 30 times closer, it would be 900 times brighter! [Note: actually, it would be even brighter than that. Since it would be closer to the Sun, it would receive more light from the Sun, making it about four or so times brighter, plus the 900 times, making it about 3000-4000 times brighter than Ceres. My thanks to Bad Reader Craig Berry for pointing that out to me!] That would make it one of the brightest objects in the sky. Even if we were to assume it was farther away, like 60 days from impact (two months), it would be ten times brighter than Ceres, and an easy naked eye object to spot. Anyone familiar with the sky would spot that easily. Incidentally, they said in the movie that only 15 telescopes in the world could spot the asteroid. As I have just shown, there are billions of unaided eyes that could have seen it as well.
Well... Back to the movie...
Our pretty female lead and her Justin Bartha-looking (Riley, from National Treasure) assistant ponder about a ‘kinetic energy spike’ that the asteroid has... It wobbles, basically.
Quote :
An emission this size can’t be kinetic energy... It’s been hit by something...
I..
I really need some booze right now...
I could pick apart that phrase here, but I have a feeling I’ll need my energy later on, and I’m sure you guys can figure out what’s wrong with it... Just...
Using the computer, they realise that the asteroid has been hit from behind from another asteroid, and that when the bigger one passes us, the smaller one behind will still impact.
Just as I’m getting over the stupid of one asteroid hiding behind another (Especially one that big... If it was that large, and that close, we’d know shitloads about it by now there is no way this scenario is plausible) the film does something that actually had me rolling on the floor with laughter.
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) I picked up from that discount DVD store, another title was the TV movie and direct-to-DVD release Ultimate Limit, released in the States as ‘Deadly Skies’.
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