Jon Amiel's doomsday thriller in the tradition of The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962) and Crack in the World (1965) stays serious long enough for a couple of catchy introductory scenes: thirty-two civilians simultaneously dropping dead within a few-block radius in Boston (the common thread appears to be their pacemakers: "Since it's not an act of war," concludes the anti-terrorist watchdog, "I think we can all breathe a little easier") and the pigeons of Trafalgar Square going spectacularly haywire. The mood -- the tone -- changes, however, with the landing of the off-course space shuttle in the drains of the Los Angeles River. "God!" as somebody aptly says of something else later on: "This all just seems too big, doesn't it?" The problem -- the barrier to a good time -- is not the Jules Vernean preposterousness of the plot (tunneling to the center of the earth and setting off a corrective nuclear blast: "You're talking about jump-starting the planet!"), nor the assembly of stereotyped characters (hunky university professor, haughty scientist, crackpot inventor, callow computer nerd, military dullard, kick-ass aviatrix), nor the comic-book lameness of the dialogue ("We've got a job to do. Let's do it"). All of these are comfortably within the tradition. The problem, rather, is what's new and now: the overlubricated velocity that transforms everything -- heroism, sacrifice, intellectual lightning bolt, the shattering of the Roman Coliseum, the melting of the Golden Gate Bridge -- into an undifferentiated and unappreciated blur. The grade-B (through grade-Z) science fiction of the Golden Age might often have been naive, clunky, transparently phony, but the slippery slickness of today's is an altogether different kind of ineptitude, and a much more insidious kind. Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo, Richard Jenkins, Bruce Greenwood, Tcheky Karyo, Alfre Woodard. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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