Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

At the United States Space Association, I guess that’s was USSA stands for, the eggheads there are tracking a comet, which somehow relates to a rover on the planet Mars and this rover taking pretty pictures. I’m not quite sure. What I do know is that this comet takes a sudden left turn and strikes Mars, which is something that comets normally don’t do, with the debris from Mars hurtling towards earth and is about to jump off into a ‘Quantum Apocalypse’ and end life as we know it.

But not so fast my friends. One of the eggheads at the space center believes the real issue isn’t the big chunks of Mars heading towards earth, but more importantly, what caused this comet to make a right turn? It seems we have a dimension sucking anomaly on our hands which is straight wrecking stuff, my quantum physically challenged colleagues, and it is on its way to earth.

While the eggheads at the space association are smart, they aren’t smart enough to deal with this catastrophe so they bring in some ringers in a pair super star quantum physicians, the primary of these being chain smoking, energy drink guzzling Dr. Trish (Gigi Edgley) who says a lot of complex fancy confusing stuff really fast. She and her colleagues have calculated the precise point that this anomaly will hit the earth, sucking everything in its path, including time, which of course is one of the eleven dimensions.  I would break down the other ten dimensions for you but I don’t want to challenge you any more quantumly than you already are. Even though this thing looks like its going to be damn near impossible to stop, Dr. Trish has a formula involving nuclear weapons that just might work, but the calculations to make this work are so complex that it will take the USSA super duper computers like 37 hours to crunch these numbers. And we have 32 hours until reality ends. I’m no Quantum Physicist, but I’m seriously not digging the math on that one.

What we need is an autistic Quantum Physical genius to get us out of this pickle. Say hello to Terry Marshall (Rhett Giles). While all that science stuff we just discussed is kind of important in this movie, what Quantum Apocalypse is really about concerns

Terry, his brother Ben the Mayor (Randy Mulkey) who has a heart problem, and Ben’s crazy hot wife Lynn (Stephanie Jacobson) who seems completely disinterested in being in this movie. Lynn is having problems with her teenaged Stepson Leo (Stuart Lafferty) because he won’t call her mom even though they look to be about the same age, with Leo being sick in love with his classmate Lindsey (Kristin Quintrall) who is dealing with her psychopathic jealous ex boyfriend Sean (Kyle Russell Clements). This is what Quantum Apocalypse is really about… melodrama.

Allrightythen… while Quantum Apocalypse is no better than any other Sci-Fi channel disaster themed epic it does take a different slant from those other pictures. Most of those movies tend to lock in on the disaster, overload us with chintzy special effects and made up fancy science talk, delivered by people behind locked doors earnestly discussing ways to avert the disaster. This movie scales that stuff back considerably and goes the route of something along the lines of ‘Independence Day’ or one of those other types of disaster epics in giving us an awful lot of characters doing an awful lot of melodramatic stuff having very little to do with the actual disaster itself. I have come to the conclusion, after experiencing both approaches, that I think I like the locked in the room approach a little better.

As it turns out I didn’t care if little Leo finally got up the gumption to give Lindsey that first kiss, or if Mayor Ben would remember to take his meds and get his high blood pressure under control. I did observe that Mayor Ben had some serious skankalicious hotties working in his office, but that wasn’t part of the melodrama. Nor did I care about stepmother Lynn and her fractured relationship with her stepson, though in all honesty Lynn didn’t seem to care all that much about it either. It’s a good thing that Stephanie Jacobson is so damn pretty because if she had put any less effort into this flick she would’ve been moving backwards. One little thing kind of bugged me though. Everybody’s getting ready to start their day, kids getting ready for school, Rainman over here is making pancakes, the Mayor is about to head off to work and then Stepmom walks in the door sporting a super snug black mini dress carrying a bunch of shopping bags. Her vocation is that of a Police Officer so where the hell did this tramp just come from dressed like that at the crack of dawn? Just curious.

The disaster part was the better part of the movie but still consisted of mostly people locked away in a room taking fancy as the filmmakers really peeled back on the chintzy special effects for this one. I did like the effect of London getting sucked up in a vortex which looked pretty cool and Gigi Edgley and Rhett Giles were the anti-Jacobson as they both gave it their all for their respective roles.

They make these movies so we watch ‘em. Whaddayagonnado? It would be nice if these movies turned out a little better than they do, and this one did at least attack the conundrum from a different angle, but unfortunately still came out to the same final quantum equation. Oh well.