Polar Storm: a.k.a. "Pole Reversal" a.k.a. "My Newest Sleeping Pill"

I wonder what Sci Fi's rationale is for airing movies under different names than they're released by. I guess Polar Storm does sound a little bit better than Pole Reversal.

Maybe Sci Fi thought its viewers would get confused and think Pole Reversal would be a bad parody of Freaky Friday, and that the movie would be about how the North and South Poles are constantly bickering, and thinking the other has it soooo easy. The South Pole is jealous that the North Pole gets all the credit for being Santa's place, but the North Pole is just too busy dealing with explorers constantly poking around in places they weren't invited to pay the South Pole enough attention. Finally they get zapped by a gypsy with way too much time on her hands into having to live for a few days in each other's icy shoes. After many a comedic turn, the story inexorably turns into a treacle-filled, nausea-inducing endurance test for the viewer, and we all learn that no one has it easy, no matter what end of the earth you're capping.

But I digress. And why wouldn't I? Polar Storm is just another disaster movie with nothing new to offer, other than the prospect of seeing Jack Coleman play someone other than Steven Carrington from Dynasty, or for you hipper viewers, Horn Rimmed Glasses guy on Heroes.

The basic plot is a large meteor strikes in Alaska, and hits so hard that it pushes the Earth off kilter. This makes the magnetic poles get all confoozled, and we get a bunch of 'mini poles' popping up all over the place. Anyone unlucky enough to live in the 'circles' of these mini poles get fried if they're using anything electronic when polar storms (Aha! The name of the movie!) rush through. You can see and hear them coming from a mile away, so you have plenty of time to turn everything off, unless you're unlucky enough to have a pacemaker.

And did you know you can also use a polar storm to recharge your car battery after a previous polar storm fries your vehicle's entire electrical system? I didn't know that! I would have thought since the circuitry was burned out that a freshly charged battery would mean squat. But hey, this is a bad movie, so details are conveniently overlooked so the characters we're supposed to care about can carry on.

There's some trite melodrama about Jack Coleman's character having issues with his military father, plus more issues with his teenage son resenting that he married one of his teachers. This is all just a smoke screen to hide the lack of anything substantial to hold the pieces of this together.

After a lot of pretty lightening storms, aurora borealis skies, and shots of the ground splitting open to swallow cars and people, we end up underwater in a Russian, diesel powered sub to deliver nuclear missiles to the bottom of the ocean. The idea is that to push the Earth back into alignment, you need to hit it with an equal amount of force on the other side of the world from where it took the initial meteor strike. This makes perfect sense in the B movie world, just like curing amnesia only requires another blow to the victim's head.

This was watchable, but not memorable. There's nothing wrong with it, per se. The acting is decent, and Jack Coleman is believable as a scientist who has all the answers when the government doesn't. If the story focused less on the forced familial melodramas and more on the inaccurate science and technology, it would have been more entertaining.

I definitely won't make an effort to watch Polar Storm again. Then again, maybe I'll keep it on my DVR in case I ever need a sleeping pill.