You’ve heard of a black hole, a temporal spatial anomaly in which all matter, including light and theoretically time itself, cannot escape, but in our Sci-Fi disaster film ‘Earth’s Last Hours’, renamed as such for the Syfy channel from ‘Armageddon 2012’, we’re dealing with white holes. White holes, in the simplified quantum mechanics that we are dealing with in this movie, is an anomaly in which dense matter is expulsed outward, possibly as refuse from what is drawn in from a black hole. Just a little general relativity, quantum mechanical, scientifical analysis for you to use as a basis for watching this movie, as provided by me, a guy who used to tutor Stephen Hawking, which you may not have known.

In a field somewhere in the Great Northwest, Vancouver standing in for Washington State, a wacky scientist (Gardiner Millar) is setting up satellite dishes and metal park benches in a field, and since this is the New America, you can’t do weird stuff like that without attracting the attention of the local feds. One of these feds, John Streich (Robert Knepper), is on the scene to interrogate this scientist when the skies suddenly open up and stuff starts descending to the earth putting the people in this field in grave danger. Unfortunately for the scientist, he takes one in the back, but before he left us he delivered some cryptic nonsense to Agent Streich which we know will come in handy down the line. Now about that… what hit this guy in the back was around the size of a bowling ball, it came from outer space, we will learn that this object had the density of around ten thousand stars which explains why it entered the earth in Washington State and exited the earth somewhere in Australia and is probably

still flying through space wrecking stuff. You would think this man would’ve died instantly, considering his spinal cord, heart, lungs, sternum and kidneys don’t exist anymore… but no, he had a good sixty seconds left. Toughest Quantum Theoretical Scientist Ever.

After this little demonstration the feds send their science team to investigate in Agent Chloe Edwards (Julia Benson) and her assistant Ally (Jennifer Shirley). Just ONCE can the female scientist, geologist, anthropologist, archeologist in these movies not be hot with a great rack? How about we give a hard working, average looking overweight actress a job every once in a while? I know that’s crazy talk, but I’m just throwing that out there. Dare to be different! Regardless, whatever happened has vexed our hot scientist, and she gets even more vexed when the hole left by the object tried to suck up her and her assistant into oblivion. What the heck is going on?

Well that’s easy and complicated at the same time. The easy part is that this object has messed up the earth’s rotation and eventually the earth will come to a standstill and life on this planet will pretty much end. The complicated part is that the government, led by smarmy Secretary of Something or Another Arnette (Roark Critchlow) and Streich’s immediate boss Agent Lockman (Micahel Kopsa) are trying to cover it up. We’ll get into the weirdness of that situation in a little bit, but recognize that we are almost all out of hope, unless of course there was a way we could restart the Earth’s rotation. That scientist with the missing sternum had a partner in Dr. Rothman (Bruce Davidson) who has been locked away in a government run insane asylum for the last fifteen years for being smart and stuff. Seriously, that’s why they put him away. But he thinks the research they were working on before he got sent away just might save the day. What would suck is if the one cat that can save the planet got shot for some reason. That would suck. We’re not saying that’s what happened, but that would suck. But if that did happen, whose gonna save the Earth now? The FBI agent, the hot scientist, the agent’s delinquent teenage son (Cameron Bright) and their cute next door neighbor (Julia Maxwell). That’s who. And to think I was worried for a minute.

In the final analysis, I kind of liked this Sci-Fi original as director David Hogan found a way extract plenty of action out of a scenario that probably should’ve had very little action, Robert Knepper is a solid actor, and while I didn’t completely understand the science behind this movie, the filmmakers sure did make it sound plausible, and I enjoyed the pretty colors generated by the special effects team and their Van Allen Radiation Belt waves gone wild.

Here’s the thing though. In these natural disaster movies either the villain is the disaster itself, which is often boring because we’re stuck watching people watch computer monitors, or the filmmakers will put some external force at work causing trouble for those trying to stop the disaster. Say like in the movies ‘Stonehenge Apocalypse’ or ‘Doomdsay Prophecy’ where the villain wants the disaster to happen so the Earth can be reset to form a New World Order. ‘Earth’s Final Hours’ on the other hand is strange because the good guys and the bad guys both want to save the Earth. Both sides need the doctor to do his thing to make this happen. Everybody has the same basic goal, yet everybody is still shooting at each other. It’s just that the good guys want to save the entire planet where the bad guys just want to save a strip of the earth they will call the Green Zone. This is where the movie kind of stops making sense because you would think that the powers that be would use this theoretical technology to save the whole planet, but they refuse to do this because it’s theoretical technology. You got that? Somewhere along the line I missed the difference between saving the whole planet and saving a strip of the planet so watching these people shoot at each other and punch each other in the face towards a common goal was baffling. The delinquent child angle, a child who could break through the tightest security of the highest levels of the U.S. government by typing DOS commands, was also fairly worthless and completely unnecessary. Besides, if the planet Earth is about to implode in a few hours and you have your super cute next door neighbor by your side, are you going type in DOS commands on your Vaio, or are you going to suggest carnal activity? I know what I would do, and yes my suggestion would’ve doomed the planet, but whaddayagonnado? I wasn’t the one taking pot shots at the one guy who could’ve fixed everything.

But like I said, I did kind of like the movie, because it is just a movie and while it was wildly erratic in theme, it had more than enough entertainment value to keep me engaged.