When Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) discovers a new star in his astronomy class, they take a picture and send it to a scientist. The scientist takes a closer look and realizes that it's not a new star, but a huge meteor headed straight for Earth (like end of the world meteor, people). Meanwhile, MSNBC reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) is busting her ass trying to get an anchor job (being one of those real annoying reporters that crosses the line in order to get her story). She is doing an investigative report on the resignation of the Secretary of the Treasury (James Cromwell). That's when she stumbles upon the truth about the meteor coming to destroy the planet.
It's true. Everyone is going to die. President Beck (Morgan Freeman!! -- is this the first black president?) announces to the world that there is in fact a giant meteor coming to Earth, but they have already been working on a plan to stop it. Fish (Robert Duvall) along with other astronauts go into outer space with nuclear bombs. They land on the giant rock and start drilling holes to put the bombs in (Did this come before or after Armageddon?). They take off from the meteor and detonate the bombs, but it only blows it into two smaller parts and they are blasted into radio silence.
Thinking that all the astronauts are dead, the world begins to panic. They design a Ark, a underground bomb shelter where they can live for two years, and start picking (some at random, some not so much) who will be able to go in the ark.
I feel like the movie didn't get interesting until the last 30 minutes when everyone thought they were going to die (or maybe they do *eyebrow raise*). Until then it was a little slow and the characters where kind of bleak. If you're not going to make it an action pack intense end of the world movie, then please have the characters be compelling from the start. There was one point where a character died and I could have cared less because I knew absolutely nothing about him (and this was at least an hour into the movie). When it started, it almost felt like you were watching three different movies. For 20 minutes they would focus on Elijah Wood, then the next 20 would be Tea Leoni and then the next 30 would be Robert Duvall. I kept wondering to myself, that's nice but what's going on with this story? Also Teo Leoni is a terrible anchor. No wonder she didn't get the job until the president made her famous. She had absolutely no emotion the whole time and sounded like a robot. And there didn't seem to be a lot of chemistry between Elijah Wood and his love interest Leelee Sobieski (but I feel like it's hard to have chemistry with her). I thought they just had a girl/boy next door crush on each other. That is until they got (SPOILER!!) married. What?!?! So maybe if they cut some of the beginning out and dove into the characters more I would have been sobbing at the end of the movie thinking "this is so sad" instead of wondering if I would survive if something like this really happened (which I probably would being an Iowa and all).
Rating: ***
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