Schrodinger's Disaster
Today's review: Quantum Apocalypse.
A movie with a title like Quantum Apocalypse is pretty much begging to be seen, even if you know absolutely nothing about the movie. However, I did see a short summary before I watched it, which made me hope I was in for something like The Martian, where the focus was on plot and believable science rather than spectacle. Sadly, I didn’t really get that…but I didn’t really get the spectacle either.
Set in both Louisiana and Huston, Texas, the story revolves around an odd discovery made by America’s space department (and I’ll get to that in a minute). While tracking a comet that’s supposed to pass by Mars, they’re confused when it abruptly changes course and smashes into Mars instead. They initially fret about if the impact and debris will affect Earth, but then one of the scientists, Dr. Rhodes (Dean Arevalo) points out a more pressing question; what made the comet change course? They call in two of the best quantum physicists in the country, the more typically nerdy Tom (Collin Galyean) and the snarky punk Trish (Gigi Edgley) to try to figure out what’s going on, and the answer isn’t good. While they use technobabble to explain that the anomaly that impacted the comet isn’t actually a black hole, it basically has the same properties and effects as black holes do in movies, and it’s going to consume the world in about three days. While the scientists try to race against the clock, a family in Louisiana-Mayor Ben Marshall (Randy Mulkey), his new wife Lynne (Stephany Jacobsen), son Leo (Stuart Lafferty), daughter Samantha (Jenna Craig), and Ben’s mentally handicapped brother Terry (Rhett Giles)-are witnesses of the strange phenomena created by the “black hole”. Inevitably, the two plots intersect thanks to Terry, who’s a mathematical savant and thus figures out what’s going on on his own and wants to go to Huston to help, since he’s internet friends with Dr. Rhodes. And from there, things simultaneously go about how you’d expect and not at all in the way you’d expect.
As you can probably tell from the cast list, this wasn’t exactly a high-profile production. Yet for all that, there’s a lot of potential in the movie. There are hints of interesting character development, like Trish’s appearance and personality clashing with the rest of the space department, the hint that the president (Peter Jurasik) has a troubled history, especially in regards to his wife, and the fact that Ben is the Mayor of his town and that Lynne is a cop. Almost none of this goes anywhere, but it's brought up just enough that it keeps you engaged until the end. Similarly, while Terry is played exactly the way most “idiot savant” characters are played in movies, he does have interesting characteristics, including an implied MacGyver-like talent for jury-rigging devices. With a little more runtime and more development given to the characters, this could probably have been a pretty good movie.
Unfortunately, the movie instead makes several odd decisions that just leave you baffled. The very first one happens right at the start of the movie, when we enter the control room of the space department and see their logo; USSA. Since this is in the first two minutes of the movie and there’s a fairly recent historical power that also used “USS” in its acronym, my immediate assumption was that this was some alternate history where Russia won the Cold War and subjugated the U.S. This very quickly turns out not to be the case (the characters talk to and about the Russians later on, making it fairly clear that they’re a separate country), meaning that it’s just an acronym for, presumably, The United States Space Administration. I further assume this was done because the filmmakers couldn’t get the right for the NASA logo, but I wish they’d come up with a less distracting acronym.
That’s a relatively minor thing, though. A more major one is the ending, which I won’t spoil but will attempt to explain to the best of my ability. For a little while, the movie’s doing things you normally don’t see in these sorts of movies, which at least gets you intrigued in what’s going to happen during the climax. Then we get a line of dialogue hinting at what’s about to happen moments before it actually happens, which is simultaneously horrible foreshadowing, bad exposition, and deus ex machina. Even then, though, it looked like we were going to get an ambiguous, kind of bittersweet ending, one that still stretches your suspension of disbelief but something I’d have been willing to roll with. Instead, it pulls one of the worst sorts of cop-out endings, and left me gaping at the screen in confusion and increasing annoyance. The rest of the movie was hit and miss, but that was a definite strike against it.
While I can’t say I completely regret watching this movie, I certainly wouldn’t recommend watching it. In addition to all the flaws I mentioned, the effects aren’t always that great, and there’s a subplot about Leo that’s typical for disaster movies but also thus makes it feel uninteresting compared to the rest of what’s going on. So while I do appreciate the attempt, I’d leave this one be and look for some other disaster/apocalypse movies that are better put together, like Independence Day or the aforementioned The Martian. And as a bonus, those movies actually got permission to use NASA in them…
A movie with a title like Quantum Apocalypse is pretty much begging to be seen, even if you know absolutely nothing about the movie. However, I did see a short summary before I watched it, which made me hope I was in for something like The Martian, where the focus was on plot and believable science rather than spectacle. Sadly, I didn’t really get that…but I didn’t really get the spectacle either.
Set in both Louisiana and Huston, Texas, the story revolves around an odd discovery made by America’s space department (and I’ll get to that in a minute). While tracking a comet that’s supposed to pass by Mars, they’re confused when it abruptly changes course and smashes into Mars instead. They initially fret about if the impact and debris will affect Earth, but then one of the scientists, Dr. Rhodes (Dean Arevalo) points out a more pressing question; what made the comet change course? They call in two of the best quantum physicists in the country, the more typically nerdy Tom (Collin Galyean) and the snarky punk Trish (Gigi Edgley) to try to figure out what’s going on, and the answer isn’t good. While they use technobabble to explain that the anomaly that impacted the comet isn’t actually a black hole, it basically has the same properties and effects as black holes do in movies, and it’s going to consume the world in about three days. While the scientists try to race against the clock, a family in Louisiana-Mayor Ben Marshall (Randy Mulkey), his new wife Lynne (Stephany Jacobsen), son Leo (Stuart Lafferty), daughter Samantha (Jenna Craig), and Ben’s mentally handicapped brother Terry (Rhett Giles)-are witnesses of the strange phenomena created by the “black hole”. Inevitably, the two plots intersect thanks to Terry, who’s a mathematical savant and thus figures out what’s going on on his own and wants to go to Huston to help, since he’s internet friends with Dr. Rhodes. And from there, things simultaneously go about how you’d expect and not at all in the way you’d expect.
As you can probably tell from the cast list, this wasn’t exactly a high-profile production. Yet for all that, there’s a lot of potential in the movie. There are hints of interesting character development, like Trish’s appearance and personality clashing with the rest of the space department, the hint that the president (Peter Jurasik) has a troubled history, especially in regards to his wife, and the fact that Ben is the Mayor of his town and that Lynne is a cop. Almost none of this goes anywhere, but it's brought up just enough that it keeps you engaged until the end. Similarly, while Terry is played exactly the way most “idiot savant” characters are played in movies, he does have interesting characteristics, including an implied MacGyver-like talent for jury-rigging devices. With a little more runtime and more development given to the characters, this could probably have been a pretty good movie.
Unfortunately, the movie instead makes several odd decisions that just leave you baffled. The very first one happens right at the start of the movie, when we enter the control room of the space department and see their logo; USSA. Since this is in the first two minutes of the movie and there’s a fairly recent historical power that also used “USS” in its acronym, my immediate assumption was that this was some alternate history where Russia won the Cold War and subjugated the U.S. This very quickly turns out not to be the case (the characters talk to and about the Russians later on, making it fairly clear that they’re a separate country), meaning that it’s just an acronym for, presumably, The United States Space Administration. I further assume this was done because the filmmakers couldn’t get the right for the NASA logo, but I wish they’d come up with a less distracting acronym.
That’s a relatively minor thing, though. A more major one is the ending, which I won’t spoil but will attempt to explain to the best of my ability. For a little while, the movie’s doing things you normally don’t see in these sorts of movies, which at least gets you intrigued in what’s going to happen during the climax. Then we get a line of dialogue hinting at what’s about to happen moments before it actually happens, which is simultaneously horrible foreshadowing, bad exposition, and deus ex machina. Even then, though, it looked like we were going to get an ambiguous, kind of bittersweet ending, one that still stretches your suspension of disbelief but something I’d have been willing to roll with. Instead, it pulls one of the worst sorts of cop-out endings, and left me gaping at the screen in confusion and increasing annoyance. The rest of the movie was hit and miss, but that was a definite strike against it.
While I can’t say I completely regret watching this movie, I certainly wouldn’t recommend watching it. In addition to all the flaws I mentioned, the effects aren’t always that great, and there’s a subplot about Leo that’s typical for disaster movies but also thus makes it feel uninteresting compared to the rest of what’s going on. So while I do appreciate the attempt, I’d leave this one be and look for some other disaster/apocalypse movies that are better put together, like Independence Day or the aforementioned The Martian. And as a bonus, those movies actually got permission to use NASA in them…