ABC Film Challenge – Sci-Fi – A – Asteroid-a-Geddon (2020) Movie Review
Director: Geoff Meed
Writer: Geoff Meed (Screenplay)
Starring: Eric Roberts, Veronika Issa, Jennifer Lee Wiggins, Craig Gellis, Terry Woodberry, D’Artagnan Woods, Isaac J Cruz
Plot: A global scientific summit debates and fails on a plan to stop a massive asteroid heading straight for Earth, with all countries blaming each other for the impeding disaster. With communications tense, the daughter of a tech billionaire assembles her own team of specialists to try to destroy the asteroid before it is too late.
Tagline – Only one chance to stop it.
Runtime: 1 Hour 27 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Story: Asteroid-a-Geddon starts as the world is facing the reality of an asteroid coming to Earth. The Global Summit is debating what they could do. The Russians causing more problems with more fragments heading to Earth. Alexandra Svoboda (Issa) is trying to lead a team which will look for a solution that doesn’t involve failed nuclear weapons.
Alexandra must continue her father’s work in creating a laser which will solve the problem. She must look to all the potential revenues on making things stop. While religious leader Malachi (Gellis) is looking to let the end of days happen.
Thoughts on Asteroid-a-Geddon
Characters & Performances
General Quinn is the American representative in the search for answers in the global summit. He pushes for things to be done his way. Which will see him go against his own word to make sure they do the same mistakes again. Eric Roberts is the biggest name in this film, but he really doesn’t need to do anything.
Alexandra Svoboda is the daughter of a great scientist, leading her own career in the field. Despite her image often putting people off taking her seriously. She becomes the only one that could save the planet with the research. She must do everything to make this happen.
Veronika Issa brings the bad girl image to life, but with a bad script she doesn’t get the big moments. We do meet the rest of the research team that Alexandra has been working with. Each not having much going on, the other leaders who are fighting to see who is right and the religious leader with his own agenda.
Story
The story here follows world leaders, a plucky scientist and a religious leader. Who have their own agenda when it comes to dealing with an asteroid heading to Earth that will be a global killer. This does fall into the same problems we have seen in recent years for the cheap disaster films. They used to be fun bad, they knew they couldn’t compete with the budget. At least went over the top. Sadly, this one ends up being a lot of science talk over any destruction scenes. The few we get just end up look like cut scenes from PS2 games. There are only so many ways you can tell the ‘asteroid is going to destroy the world’ story before you run out of ideas.
Themes – Asteroid-a-Geddon is meant to be a cheap sci-fi knock-off Greenland I think, judging from only seeing the trailer of that film, it wants to have a couple of big disaster moments, which are laughable bad and lacklustre CGI explosions, in the ocean, a road and part of Las Vegas, we are aware the CGI isn’t going to be good, but sadly, it doesn’t even hit the so bad it is good style, just looking like someone quickly added paint effects.
Final Thoughts – Asteroid-a-Geddon is a poor knock off disaster movie that lacks the destruction, story structure or intensity of the end of the world coming.
