Disaster: Volcano
Our Breaking Point: The Subway Scene

How long do you think the people were sitting in that train? Seriously — how long? After a little while of watching people pass out, one after the other, from heat? I'd LEAVE. But no, this guy has to die a painful death walking through lava. Which in itself was a horrible thing — walk faster, melty guy!

Here's the remixed version — watch the full scene here.

Disaster: Deep Impact
Our Breaking Point: The Wave of Love

Nothing brings a daughter and a distant father back together like a giant tidal wave. Call me black-hearted, but this whole "I'm facing my destruction head on, and what? Oh hey, there's my dad who was never around. What the hey, I forgive you!" Tasted like yuck. And to all the people loading up their cars: Come on, it's the end of the world, the roads are always blocked. I bet they felt foolish when they realized they could have just stood on a high mountain to avoid the water. But the hug-it-out wave was still the worst.

Disaster: Armageddon
Our Breaking Point: Ben Affleck
Good theme music and spaceman slo-mo walking, but even if you can convince the audience that a team of misfit drillers can be trained to do their jobs in space, there's no way you can make me believe this scene. Remember, the crew went up in two ships, and they get separated. But don't worry, Ben Affleck's asteroid rover isn't damaged, and he and the remaining crew drive across a sharp-as-razors terrain, fly over a cannon, and find their way back to the other crew. After they shoot their way out of the ship. WHY DID IT HAVE GUNS IN THE FIRST PLACE? Uh, no.

Disaster: The Day After Tomorrow
Our Breaking Point: Frost Running

I didn't think it was possible for a character to piss me off more than when Dennis Quaid announced that he would be walking from Philly to New York, through the worlds most horrific storm, ever. And then his movie son Jake Gyllenhaal and his friends ran from frost, and a pack of wolves. They outran cold. You cannot run from cold, and you cannot protect yourself from cold by shutting the door, nor can you breathe air that is that cold — but screw science, you just plain can't run from cold.

Disaster: Twister
Our Breaking Point: Thank God For These Leather Straps

Twister was a fun movie about lunatics who chase twisters, thus making storm-chasing look infinitely cooler than it could ever be. But for the most part, it's just lots of driving and yelling up at the sky and seeing cows fly past, etc — you know, good stuff. Until the big one. At the end, Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt chase and get chased by the really, really big tornado, and instead of dying, they tie themselves with leather belts to a pole, and survive. Their arms remain intact and neither of them manage to get hit by any of the debris that is encircling them. Lucky ducks, eh?

Disaster: The Core
Our Breaking Point: Explaining Unobtainium

The science behind the ship. It's made out of unobtainium, so the hotter and deeper it gets the stronger it gets. And it's shaped like a penis. So yeah...

Disaster: Outbreak
Our Breaking Point: Dustin Saves The Town With His Words

Between a ton of accidental spills and the trained professional scientists sticking their hands into infected blood samples or falling asleep on the job, the worst moment of all is by far Dustin Hoffman's magical speech. Yes, it's worse than the little girl playing with the ebola host monkey. Never in a million years would Dustin Hoffman be allowed to sit up there in that plane. I'd give him two minutes before he was shot out of the sky.

Disaster: The Happening
Our Breaking Point: The Ending

First the plants attack cities, then the roads, then the small cities, then groups, then angry people, then it's the wind. What. The Hell. How can something that probably took millions of years to develop change in hours? Because M. Night said so, that's why — so quit your whining and watch the big ending payoff. Wahlberg and Zooey then decide to suicides themselves, because Zooey decided even though the plants are killing everyone, she should take their dead friend's child outside to run amuck. And now they are trapped — by wind. Time to give up hope and walk towards each other with big sweeping instrumentals, what HAPPENS? Nothing. "The event must have stopped before we went out here." Screw this movie.

Disaster: Dante's Peak
Our Breaking Point: Grandma Gives Her Life

While I agree with having those who have already lived full lives sacrifice themselves first, this is a freaking strange scene. They're like, "Five seconds to the dock," and she decides to walk to the shore too, for extra dramatics.

[Thanks to Annalee and Ray Wert for the phallic Core jokes]

I have to say Impact's greatest achievement was making me appreciate The Core anew. Not that I need much help to do that, since The Core, starring Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank, deserves a high place of honor among right-thinking global-disaster movie fans everywhere. But Impact was basically like The Core, only much cheaper and much slower. People have been comparing it to Armageddon and Deep Impact, but The Core is really the greatest point of comparison, in my book. Weird global disasters, birds flying upside down, communities in ruins, people freaking out, and worse disasters on the way. So a group of flawed, messed up scientists has to make it right. The difference is, The Core is zippy and totally loony in its logic-avoidance, and it features Swank and Eckhart tunneling into the center of the Earth (seeing massive diamonds along the way) pretty early on. Impact, meanwhile, sort of drags along and weaves in tons of soap-operatic plots.

Okay, I'll stop rhapsodizing about The Core and actually talk about last night's steaming pile of brown matter... sorry, brown dwarf.

So Impact, famously, was supposed to be a Syfy Channel miniseries, but ABC outbid Syfy for the rights to air it. Based on part one, I'd say they should have had a bidding war to decide who was forced to run this thing. That said, the parts where CG asteroids hurtle through the sky and crash into the Earth and the Moon are pretty great, and I liked all the stuff where scientists stand around and talk seriously about how unprecedented this all is, and how the Moon is now in an elliptical orbit.

The parts that were tooth-pulling unbearable, though, were all of the long stretches where the miniseries tried to make us care about its characters, who just got more and more hateful the better we got to know them.

So in a nutshell, there's a huge meteor shower, and everybody around the world is watching in excitement. But unbeknownst to the watching masses, a brown dwarf is hiding in the meteor shower, and it has a huge mass and magnetic attraction. (But somehow it manages to avoid disturbing any of the other planets in the solar system, or otherwise announcing its presence.) The impact causes huge flaming asteroids to come rocketing down to Earth, smashing people. But then it gets worse — somehow the Moon gets into an elliptical orbit away from Earth and then towards it, and whenever it comes closer to Earth, there are freak gravity effects and electrical storms — see the totally awesome clip above — and everything goes hellzapoppin.

And at the end of all this horror, we discover that actually, the Moon's elliptical orbit is going to bring it closer and closer to Earth, faster and faster, until it finally crashes into us and obliterates the planet.

But as I said, by the time the spectre of global annihilation has reared its brown dwarfy head, we've already had two hours of wishing all of these people would die. Especially since this elite squad of science geeks is supposedly our only hope of avoiding total decimation, and all they ever do is sit around drinking wine, and whiskey and various other spirits, and talking about how science has been proved wrong lately. There are a hundred discussions that go roughly like this: "I used to believe in science, but in the past few days, science has totally been called into question." "But it's only by questioning science that we get science." "But what if science is wrong?" I found myself wanting to operate the remote control with my cranium, since ether fast-forwarding through this drek or giving myself brain damage would be an acceptable response to what I was seeing.

I brown-dwarf you not, there are two separate scenes where a very serious military person looks very seriously at the camera and says the same line: "You can't hide from gravity!!"

But meanwhile, every one of our hard-drinking, Newton-questioning science types has an incredibly annoying personal life. There's Natasha Henstridge's character, who for some reason was married to this totally douchey reporter with a soul patch, who keeps chasing her around wanting to get the inside scoop on the brown dwarf thing. David James Elliott plays Alex Kinter, an astrophysicist who's helping his two kids get through the death of their mom by calling them "Buddy" a lot, and by keeping them around their brain-damaged, agoraphobic grandpa (James Cromwell, utterly wasted in both senses of the word.) And then Roland the Euro-git (Benjamin Sadler) has a pregnant fiancee, who cares about flowers and wedding catering the exact same way he cares about science and saving the planet. Yee Jee Tso (from the Doctor Who TV movie) plays Jared, who has issues too, but we don't really find out what they are. I think they have something to do with Jesus.

Their Hallmark-channel storylines are utterly cloying and dull, and they drag the space-rocks action to a grinding halt, forcing us to pay attention to these whiny, narcissistic characters. Why won't grandpa go outside? Will little Sadie keep believing in the man in the moon? What about little Jake, will he keep hitting home runs in the face of armageddon? And will Martina understand that Roland the Euro-git has to put saving the planet from a lunar impact before planning their wedding? Blah blah blah, and who the fuck cares?

That said, I'll probably watch the second half this coming Sunday, just hoping against hope that all of these people get blasted out of space by the brown dwarf, leaving what's left of the planet totally pristine and lovely for some sympathetic aliens to come along and reclaim in a million years or so.

Anyway, it's a good thing this tripe got pummeled in the ratings, losing out to golf and 60 Minutes, so ABC will never try to beat the Syfy Channel at its own game again.

I say flaw singular, because the whole movie is pretty much flaw. The dialogue is pretty much non-stop cheese from beginning to end, with Eckhart lovingly reciting lines like, "The lack of oxygen kept me from weeping like a little girl, as is my custom in dangerous situations." And, when a general says the word "Can't" is not in his vocabulary: "Then I suggest you get one of those word-a-day calendars, general." Meanwhile, Swank gets to look stoic except when she flares her nostrils and says things like, "Hot DAMN" when they broach the Earth's crust.

Fun fact: The Core is co-written by John Rogers, who has a degree in physics from McGill University. Rogers also co-wrote Catwoman, and showed up in person to collect his "worst screenplay" award at the Razzies. Rogers had a story credit on Transformers. And yet, he was also the writer or co-writer of alien-armor comic Blue Beetle for its first 25 or 26 issues — which was my favorite run on any superhero comic, period, of the past five years. Weird, huh? [IMDB]