Powerful

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

MELTDOWN: DAYS OF DESTRUCTION, a would-be TV disaster movie from 2006, is only worth watching if you're wondering what happened to Casper Van Dien's career after STARSHIP TROOPERS (answer: not a lot). It's essentially a heatwave-based thriller, featuring some science guff about an asteroid passing close to the Earth causing our planet to move closer to the sun.What it all boils down to is a kind of road/post-apocalypse movie, as Van Dien and his colleagues/friends and family are forced to try to get to a place of safety while contending with intense temperatures. Strangely, despite the supposed heatwave, most of the characters continue to wear long shirts and/or jackets - at least the cult '60s flick NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT made the effort of making the protagonists look all sweaty and dishevelled! Given the poverty-row budget, most of the threat comes from various looters and bad guys, and it's all done in a gung ho fashion and fairly well paced. But the writing is predictable and the characters non-existent, with none of the cast making much of an impact. About the only scene in the film I enjoyed was the bit with the exploding cars, which was novel; the rest is merely humdrum.

Being a fan of sci-fi films, I was initially attracted by the title, but as it appeared this was going to be yet another near-disaster movie of the "asteroid/comet/meteor about to hit the earth and wipe out humanity, but Hooray! America will save the world" genre which has been done so many times before, I nearly didn't bother to continue watching, and with hindsight I'm sorry I did. However, what did sway me was the unusual premise that the asteroid's gravitational effect as it narrowly missed the earth pulled our planet nearer to the sun. (It wasn't clear whether Earth was continuing to approach the sun or whether it was simply in a stable new orbit, but maybe I was losing concentration if that was stated.) However, while raging fires are sweeping across the globe and two rival groups of characters (the goodies and the baddies) are desperately trying to get to a plane to fly them to the Arctic, the possibility is aired that the gravitational force of the other planets might pull the earth back into its proper orbit, and the sign that this has happened would be that rain would once again start to fall. So when the rival factions get to the airport and learn that the plane - their last hope of survival - has crashed, a battle takes place and surprise, surprise - the goodies win. But just as our heroes seem doomed to burn up anyway, Hey presto! Down comes the rain! Gosh - those planets worked pretty fast to get the earth back in place in such un-cosmic haste! My advice is: don't waste an hour and a half watching this!

Despite scientist Nathan's warnings, his boss continues an experiment meant as publicity for his satellite firm: exploding an asteroid. Instead it splits, and the major piece, the size of Iceland, changes course to earth. It is deflected but so close that it shift our course closer to the sun, causing rapid extreme heating, hopefully only mid-term. Nathan warns his sister, TV journalist Carly, and she her lover, police detective Tom. He brings his unruly daughter Kim, her ex-con lover C.J. and her mother, nurse Bonnie, when Nathan offers a flight to a friend's Arctic weather station. Tom takes charge of a dangerous trip to the airport, as everywhere on earth things catch fire and people fight for water, transport and sheer looting.....fantastically bad from the beginning, Van Dien shows his shirt no mercy as he spends the duration of the film sweating and looking a little concerned in some scenes. it's highly unbelievable that this guy could have a family, let alone trying to bring it together, but he does.as the heat rises, we see the group walk very slowly, meeting people and getting into scrapes. This carries on for the whole film.Van Diens daughter has to be as unlucky as Kim Bauer, because she has a gun to her head a couple of times, nearly gets blown up, and faints at the badness of it all.if this had an amazing budget, big stars (no offence to the cast here) and Bay at the helm, this could have been a fun popcorn blockbuster.Instead we get one dimensional villains, extras who appear to be asleep on the floor, and a literal mad scientist.But it's awful in a laughable sort of way.

"Meltdown" is a disaster (tele)movie about really hot weather starring Casper Van Dien. That one sentence is probably enough to make most people run for cover but as a disaster movie devotee and long suffering fan of Mr Van Dien, I found "Meltdown" pretty irresistible.You could drive a semi-trailer through the holes in the film's plot. In short, scientists fire a nuclear weapon into a meteor with the intention of developing a meteor defence program. However, instead of fragmenting, a large chunk of the rock heads towards earth only to be deflected. Unfortunately, the near miss manages to push the earth out of orbit, dragging it towards the sun and resulting in really hot weather.Casper plays Tom, a police officer, who attempts to save his family and new girlfriend from the heatwave and protect them from the looters who have taken over the city. This synopsis actually makes the film sound more interesting than it is. In reality, most of the film involves sweaty people walking around looking for water. Strangely, it never enters anyone's head to turn on a tap or purchase a beverage from a vending machine. Things get a bit more exciting towards the end of the film when rogue policemen capture the brother of Tom's new girlfriend. This at least gives Casper the opportunity to wrap a shirt around his head and shoot a gun.The extent to which you will enjoy "Meltdown" surely depends on your view of Van Dien. Personally, I find something deeply hypnotic about Casper's cheesy, square jawed persona and his determination to appear in trashy, straight-to-TV action thrillers. He reminds me of Zoolander with guns. Despite my appreciation for Casper's body of telemovie work, I would still like to see him make the occasional film that actually gains a cinematic release.In addition to Casper's stunning acting performance, further "Meltdown" highlights include a couple of exploding cars, a bad CGI meteor and some hilariously improbable science. The other actors in the film are all competent, with Venus Terzo a standout as Tom's first love, Bonnie. Amanda Crew also makes an impression as Tom's daughter.