Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Oh the Sci-Fi Channel original. Is there a more cinematically beleaguered beast than this? I don’t think so. Today we are taking a gander at another Sci-Fi Channel disaster movie in ‘Annihilation Earth’ which I wasn’t all that interested in seeing… I mean who would seriously be interested in seeing yet another Sci-Fi Channel disaster movie… but then this cat I work with who has seen this movie told me how this movie ended. Well… with that knowledge I had to remotely set my DVR so I could discover for myself how this movie got to that ending.

Luke Goss, one of our favorite actors here at the FCU, plays super duper smart nuclear physicist Dr. David Smith who, along with his partner Raja Bashir (Colin Salmon) have just created this most awesome form of super clean, almost limitless brand of crazy inexpensive energy using super colliders and stuff. No, I don’t quite have the science down, but trust me, it’s awesome.

David is concerned because the bureaucrat running this operation, southern U.S. Senator Paxton (Marina Sirtis)… Okay, we gotta stop right there. I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to have Marina Sirtis affect a southern accent in this movie but the woman has probably created one of the most gawdawful southern accents you’re ever gonna hear. Mah cunstiiituents… she would say over and over again. The only thing worse is those movies where Bulgaria is pretending to be Mississippi and they force Bulgarian actors into trying to do the American South. This movie was shot in Bulgaria as well by the way.

Anyway David is all upset because Raja has been logged making unauthorized access to some of the files in his program and has been temporarily removed from the program as a security threat. How a man can be accused of unauthorized access to stuff he’s authorized to access is beyond me, but we will roll with it. You see Raja is an Arab and the Arab nations are none too happy about any kind of energy that doesn’t revolve around the use of oil. And when an Arab is unhappy what does he do? Well in movies he sends somebody to blow stuff up.

This will introduce us to Khalid (Velislav Pavlov) the worlds most awesome terrorist. I mean instead of harassing folks who have legitimate access to the facility maybe we should have just a little better security around the facility to keep terrorist out. Like this dude, and we hate profile here, but he looks like a terrorist and I’m not letting him and his fake badge in. My profiling would’ve stopped this guy from simply walking in the facility, opening panels stuff, planting bombs, shooting staff members in the head and ultimately blowing half of France killing thirty million people. Just a security suggestion. So while Khalid’s terrorist bomb plot was a success for the most part, the bad part is that by blowing up this Super Collider he has destabilized the earth’s magnetic sphere in addition to slowly activating the earth’s tectonic plates setting forth a series of events which threaten to destroy our very planet. Something called the Doomsday Equation. Ominous sounding isn’t it?

The only thing keeping the earth from completely imploding are the two remaining super colliders which are working as some kind of resistor or something to this catastrophic event. Not that Khalid the terrorist cares because he’s busted up into another poorly secured collider facility and is trying to force our poor pathetic Dr. Raja to enter in a code to allow him to blow this one up too. Now here’s the situation… Raja is trying to convince David, via remote link, that the remaining super colliders must stay active or the earth will implode. David thinks he has to shut down the super colliders to save the earth. One of these cats is wrong. And there’s a woman behind David saying ‘Ah cain’t terust theus taroe-reust. Seriously.

We have to say that we have seen way worse Sci-Fi original movies than this movie ‘Annihilation Earth’, there is no doubt about that. This is not to say the Annihilation Earth is a good movie because it isn’t but it has some things that do make it watchable in addition to a large number of issues which make really stupid. The bulk of this movie’s high stupidity level can’t really be addressed or fixed considering how ambitious these filmmakers were. If they called this movie ‘Annihilation North Dakota’ then the lack of security around things that can destroy the planet, or the fact that thirty million people have just been murdered and they send a whopping team of four supermodels to investigate, or the fact that our pair of scientist who have developed this tech casually forgot to mention to the powers that be that there is scenario where this tech could possibly destroy the planet earth, or that matters of planetary destruction rest in the capable decision making hands of one lone scientist (who, by the way, is responsible for this destruction) and one bureaucrat with a terrible accent… then these shortcomings could be easily passed off. But then who would DVR a movie called ‘Annihilation North Dakota’? I would, but I’m in the minority over here. Our terrorist is a bit questionable too for on one hand he wants everyone in the west to bow down to Allah, then on the other hand he wants kill everybody he wanted to bow down ten minutes ago. Who’s gonna bow down now fool? Plus if this cat is smart enough to decipher the ‘Doomsday Equation’ then he should be smart enough to know that he’s about also implode the planet earth, thus limiting the bow down ability of just about everybody. Of course this evil terrorist gets his… but then… well… I’m just saying he could’ve made it to end of the movie and it really wouldn’t have mattered.

But the movie is oddly watchable. It has special effects aplenty, the director Nick Lyon is quite good at crafting Watchable Nonsense as we rather liked his version of the ‘Species’ universe and while almost nothing in this movie made any kind of sense in a real world kind of way, in this bizarro world that it exists in… it still doesn’t make any sense but we adjusted to it. And there was the ending. I knew it was coming so it did lack the impact but still… kind of cool.

If you watch Sci-Fi movies on the Sci-Fi Channel then you have a thick skin and you should be saluted for your due diligence. This one will not kill you the way say that back to back viewings of ‘Raptor Island’ and ‘SS Doomtrooper’ would most certainly do you in. Where I come from we call that a ‘back-handed compliment’ and we got plenty of those to hand out.