Asteroid: Too much melodrama, not enough asteroid action

It really should be plural, since there was more than one asteroid, but that name was already taken...

With the video game Asteroids already calling 'dibs' on that name, this made-for-tv movie from NBC decided to use it in the singular form, even though there are actually more than one asteroid threatening the planet. Maybe they were running on the theory that it was 'one asteroid at a time is threatening the planet, so technically we're correct, so nyah!'. Of course, it's not a good enough of a movie to do in-depth research to figure out, so we'll drop this whole part of the conversation.

The movie starts off mildly interesting with an astronomer watching a comet, and noticing that it's picked up some hitchhikers. She decides that it's noteworthy enough to call FEMA, and a very brief interlude later we have the evacuation of Kansas City, Missouri ordered. We have to deal with tons of side stories about different characters so we know there's a 'human face' to the coming disaster. The astronomer has a precocious kid, a too-good-to-be-true father who's also a great doctor, and a deceased husband to make sure there's opportunities for treacle. The FEMA agent is dedicated to his job to the point of risking his life at the drop of a hat. We have a firefighter with a wife and children, where the wife doesn't understand why he has to keep fighting fires when she needs him at home. There are other gripping stories peppered throughout, but it's mostly filler to make up for the lack of actual asteroid action, and the fact we were promised a science fiction-y sort of tale, but got an uninteresting human interest story instead.

It wouldn't have been so painful if it weren't by the numbers human beings triumphing over disaster and reaching out a helping hand to everyone around them. It's unrealistic, and knows it is, and practically screams "This is the way we should all be, don't ya think???". Beat me over the head too much with this type of message and I just want the whole world to explode so I don't have to watch good actors get dragged down by lazy, saccharin-laced writing.

The first half of the movie wasn't so bad. This was where they put the asteroid action, and we even get a nifty scene with Kansas City flooding. I liked it mostly because it wasn't slick CGI, but instead someone actually put the effort into making a scale model, and then flooding and filming that. The blue screens were hit and miss. Some were seamless, but the ones that weren't jump out at you waving their arms. The shots of asteroid chunks hitting are passable, but not done as well as the flood scene.

The second half of the movie is when it all goes belly up. The asteroids are done pummeling the Earth, so now it's time to watch everyone wander around aimlessly, shout at FEMA agents who are trying to help, or do dumb ass things like leave a town where you and your kids are safe in order to rush to where the big asteroid hit because you think your firefighter husband might be dead. I'm sorry (actually, I'm not), but if my spouse did that, the first thing I would do would be to scream myself hoarse at them for bringing my children into harm's way, especially because of such a stupid reason. What would she have done if her husband were really dead? Let her kids hug the corpse while they breathed the dust-filled air in a disaster zone? Of course we're also supposed to believe this resulted in happy endings all about when in real life I think it would have ended in divorce court.

Maybe I'm just cynical and unfeeling, but this painful endurance test would have been a heck of a lot better if it had just gone for a quick 'science fiction' resolution and left all the angst out. Send even more planes up to shoot the asteroids with even more lasers. Super heat the atmosphere by igniting the methane from all the cow farts so the asteroids dissolve on impact. I don't know. Just do something different than what I sat through for nearly four hours and am now kicking myself for doing.

If I can do any good in this world, let it be this. Let my warning to not waste your time on this 'epic' mini-series go out in the universe and save even one person from my experience.