Meltdown: Days of... oh, forget it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478207/

Meltdown: Days of Destruction. With Casper Van Dien

So, yeah. Johnny Rico, going ahead and deciding that being typecast is better than being not cast at all, squaring off against… um… a heatwave. That’s it.

Don’t Be Fooled: This is no ordinary heatwave. This is like, hotter-than-a-Nelly-video-hot. See, a bunch of scientist – like 5 or 6 or so – got together and tried to blow up an asteroid with a ten-megaton nuclear bomb, in space. Big ups for using a “weapon in space,” but beyond that, it doesn’t make sense. The scientists are, like, in a break room from a manufacturing plant or something. Not exactly CTU, here. And they’re lobbing around nukes, and nobody’s paying any attention. What the?! I know that national news doesn’t go much beyond punditry, celebrity gossip and missing/dead affluent women, but really, there’s no journalist covering this?

But there is a journalist; local TV reporter Carly. She’s dating Rico, who’s a cop with a checkered past. Actually, not really, he just has an ex-girlfriend, Bonnie, with whom he has a daughter that he didn’t used to know about, but does now. The daughter is dating this criminal guy, who Rico sees on a stakeout, so he doesn’t like him. And that scientists, who thinks that blowing up the asteroid is a bad idea? That’s Carly, Rico’s new girlfriend’s, brother.

Everybody got that? Of course not. It’s like watching an episode of Friends, only, instead of the self-involved characters being annoying while not worrying about how they’re going to pay for their apartments (which must cost $20,000 a month), the self-involved characters in Meltdown are not worrying about the Earth hurtling into the sun.

Oh, yeah. That asteroid thing? Not so good. The jist of it is, it redirects the Earth’s orbit so that the earth starts getting just a little closer to the sun. This is problematic.

What It Has Going for It: …..

…

Well, there was this one time where Rico yells “Get down!,” and… nah.

…

Nah. Next section.

What Sucks About It: Let’s put it this way: it needed it some Grieco.

I’m no physicist. In fact, quite the opposite. I had Accelerated Physics in high school, and for my final project, I had to built this contraption that would protect and egg after I dropped it off the roof. What happened to my suspension of disbelief in this movie is not unlike what happened to my egg.

Which is to say, nothing good.

See, the big deal of the movie is that the earth is like, hurtling towards the sun. But nobody seems to notice this. Really? There’s not even a science blogger in Iceland who pays attention to this stuff?

Anyway, it gets really hot. Like, 120 degrees hot! In some town that is not prepared for, er, a heat wave of such magnitude. Which causes mass sunburn, water riots, the breakdown of civil order, and finally, yes, cars blowing up because the gas ignites because it’s so hot. Let’s pull the last one out. Is the flash point of gasoline really 130 degrees? Aren’t several middle eastern countries and countries on the equator 130 degrees in, like, summer? Wikipedia says that the autoignition temperature of gasoline is 475 degrees Fahrenheit. I mean, I can buy the Earth hurtling into the sun. But seriously.

Did they mean Celsius? Please say Celsius. But wait, 120 degrees Celsius would be above the boiling point of water, so like, Rico would just boil. They mean Fahrenheit.

And also, the big plot is that they’re all trying to get to an airport where the dissenting scientist guy knows a guy who can fly them to the arctic. But they are ambushed by bandits who run off with the scientist guy and the plot. Anyway, they’re waiting for this plane, and yeah, the plane blows up. OF COURSE THE PLANE BLOWS UP. All of the cars were blowing up. Lawn mowers were blowing up. Everything was blowing up.

And it seriously takes them three days (of destruction!) to get to the airport. Three days? Checking my notes, I have written “WHY CAN’T THEY DRIVE AT NIGHT” about five times, for different reasons (car blowing up, movie taking too long, etc).

Lastly, yeah, the movie ends when they run out of plot and it rains, which means, apparently, that everything’s going to be okay. Nobody actually does anything to solve any problems. It’s dues ex, only you don’t want the gods to save these people, because they annoy you. Except, like, and sorry to caps you again, THE EARTH IS STILL TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN. Does that mean that next year at this time, all the cars are blowing up again?

You know what? Nevermind. I don’t care. The whole thing was completely ridiculous. The whole movie was the functional equivalent of waking up in the middle of the night and thinking that your air conditioner is broken because you’re really warm, but you’re comfy, so you don’t want to get up and check, then it clicks on and you cool off and you fall back asleep. That’s it.

“Point Break: The Musical” Moment: You’re a cop on the run from a nasty heat wave with your girlfriend, your ex-girlfriend, your daughter (with the ex), her boyfriend who’s a criminal, and your girlfriend’s brother. A bunch of really dumb stuff happens, but in the meantime, your daughter’s boyfriend pulls a bunch of dudes off of her, pulls her out of a car that blows up because of a horrible plot device, and then stabs a dude who tries to kidnap her. But yeah, he’s sort of a criminal. At this point is he:

A. Still a dick that you have to be a jackass to for another half hour before you finally give him your trust.

B. Probably a decent guy

C.Stuck in the same awful, awful movie as you and therefore your brother.

Take a guess.

How This Relates to Michigan Football: Well, the parallel to the Wisconsin game is obvious. All you had to do to survive the “days of destruction” was, like, HANG AROUND and everything ends up okay at the end in a terrifically, ridiculously, and completely implausible way.