Just watched this last night on my home-recorded DVD I made from the VHS tape. It's about a group of miners sent to a "rogue moon" (big orange meatball that's doing about warp 1,000) that's on a collision course with earth. They're supposed to drill tunnels in it, after which the reactor will be blown up, the explosion routed through the tunnels, and the moon knocked off course. The plot sort of sounds familiar, but I just can't quite place it
We start with the scientist, played by Caroline Barclay (who actually looks pretty hot in her IMDb photo, but not so much in this movie). She's arguing with some military guy - he wants to nuke the thing, but we have to listen to the explanation that's required in every movie of this sort about how nuking it will only make it worse. It'll blow it into a bunch of pieces that will all hit the earth. I've got a bit of a problem with this - the moon is still six months away. Nuking it that far out would be like firing a shotgun at something 10,000 yards away: the shot would spread out into such a huge pattern that it would be a miracle if a single piece actually hit the target. But never mind.
The scientist is sent to the rogue moon, where the drilling crew is already halfway done with their job. We immediately learn that this is one of those movies where the "good" character, the scientist, is a cast iron b***h and the "bad" character, the drilling foreman, is actually pretty cool and quite likable. I guess that's what happens when you put one good actor (Xander Berkeley as the foreman) in the middle of a mess like this. He shines. The rest of the crew aren't bad, ranging from a tough-on-the-outside but delicate-flower-on-the-inside chick named Nuke Em, to a few likeably grizzled veterans, and a few regular guys. They're all pretty lazy and unmotivated. Xander's got 'em all worked up about the company getting paid a whole lot by the government to save the earth, and none of that cash trickles down to them. And their equipment is old and worn out, blah blah blah. Apparently earth is completely unconcerned with this whole "rogue moon gonna destroy the planet" thing. I found that odd, but decided to just go with it. I couldn't tell if they were trying to put some anti blue collar working man message in this movie, or just desperate to fill 90 minutes with some sort,
any sort, of dialog. So the scientist chick starts b***hin' and b***hin', the foreman responds by hitting on her, she has a rather bizarre heart-to-heart with the Nuke Em chick, straight out of an episode of the Oprah show (I thought maybe they were gonna start making out), and then they find something buried deep within the moon. A vanadium box, full of skeletons and platinum. And the remains of some long dead monster. So the miners go crazy over the platinum, the scientist b***hes at them, and they call it a day.
Of course, while they sleep that night, the monster comes back to life, and over the remainder of the movie it does the usual "pick them off one by one" thing. This could have been good, as the atmosphere was nice and the characters were, for the most part, likable enough and I sort of cared about them. The monster really wasn't that bad either. But of course there's the whole b***h b***h b***h thing that distracted me from any prospect of having fun watching this.
Overall, it had potential, but due to a bad script and over reliance on black-and-white, good vs. bad characters, it wound up being only average.
