3. The Chairman? Unfortunately, no. This isn’t even the Barefoot Contessa. It’s Solar Attack, another slice of made-for-TV ham, which features Mark Decascos, a rising SyFy star, and a smorgasbord of nobodies. Coronal mass ejections head for Earth and doom us all! I’m choosing to include this in the comet/asteroid impact section because the CMEs are portrayed as compact blobs of fire that take out areas hundreds of miles across, whereas real CMEs are HUGE, not compact or blobby. Like bigger than the Earth huge, and expanding outwards as they move into space.
There’s really not much to say about this one because the premise is so dumb. Can a CME take out a satellite’s electrical systems? Yes. Can a CME cause a satellite to fall out of orbit? Not so much. The basic premise is that CMEs will penetrate the ozone layer (which doesn’t stop CMEs, the Earth’s magnetic field does) and ignite the high levels of methane in the atmosphere (caused by global warming) and burn us all to a crisp. Those of you who have read any of my posts know that the solution is to nuke somethin’. In this case, it’s the polar ice cap. A wee 25 megatons will vaporize the ice cap and quench the methane flames. Problem solved?
4. Post Impact. Maybe it’s not fair to pick on these Syfy Channel original productions, but I never promised to be fair except in my dispersal of scientific justice. A comet collides with an uncharted asteroid, which sends it on a collision course with Earth. This induces a new ice age. The main plot of this movie involves a bad guy taking over a military satellite and the government’s plan to take him down, which isn’t exactly astrophysics, so there’s not much, you know, science to discuss here. Although seismic activity induced by the impact is threatening to break up Europe. So there’s that. Thankfully, the military satellite can microwave the atmosphere and warm the planet again and they all live happily ever after I guess. To be honest, I fast-forwarded through a lot of this one.
5. Meteor Apocalypse. Hey, usually you have to sit through the whole movie before the nukes come out, but here it happens in the opening scene. Then tragedy strikes! That tragedy being the rest of the film. Or it’s a fragment of the comet because nuking it never works! All the nuclear-armed countries on Earth fire ICBMs at the comet. I bet you didn’t know ICBMs could travel thousands of miles into space and, when launched from different locations around the Earth and despite differences in design and propulsion technology, all arrive simultaneously at the same location. Well they can, so moving on.
In this case, nuking the comet leads to countless meteor fragments raining fiery, explosive destruction down on the Earth. Yup–fracture a comet and you get meteorites. The twist is that these meteorite fragments contain some sort of radioactive toxin that infects the groundwater and can kill instantly if not treated immediately by a shot of… something? It sounded like bedazzlin‘ but that can’t be it. Oh, midazolam. That makes more sense I guess.
There are a lot of “comet” fragments falling, but around 25 minutes into this thing a meteorite hits a jeep in the middle of a desert. Do you know what the probability of that is? (Take my class and find out!) The meteors and final major comet fragment leave nice cratery holes in the ground, but with no sign of shockwave. It’s like the filmmakers saw a picture of a crater, but didn’t actually bother to learn about the phenomenon of cratering. I’m not asking for 100% accuracy, but at least check the wikipedia. That’s what I did. To spare you from the pain, I’ll tell you how this film ends. The meteor fragments wipe out Vegas then the comet hits L.A., killing untold millions of people, but the hero is reunited with his family so it’s a happy ending.