This could have been super but, as with the case of most modern action films, the action is way overdone. Still, it had its moments.....
THE BAD -One word describes a lot of scenes in here: chaos. Things are blown up all over the place, people are shouting everywhere. It gets to be too much, especially in the last hour which gets ludicrous. You practically have a headache when you're finished watching the 150 minutes of mayhem.
Half of the disasters that happen to the astronauts were not needed, and many of them come one after the other. It wound up muddling the story. Do today's filmmakers think you have to have something dramatic and loud every two minutes to keep their audiences? And talk about loud.....holy eardrums, Bataman, you could be deaf listening to this movie which includes a lot of loud heavy-metal "music." It's too noisy.
There are touches of "Independence Day" mentality with very unrealistic with a veteran astronaut smuggling a gun on board a ship; the daughter of the one of the astronauts barging into the command center and shoving the center's leader in the middle of a crisis (in reality, she wouldn't be allowed in the room to begin with); and the usual last-second impossible heroics. I mean, sometimes I swear I was watching a movie made specifically for morons. Speaking of stupid, what was that goofy cosmonaut character (Peter Stormare) all about. That's just another example of what I was just talking about - totally unrealistic people. Why does Hollywood like to portray astronauts - some of the classiest, most educated and reserved people in the world - in such a negative light? Just another of its sicknesses, I guess where good is bad and bad is good.
THE GOOD - What was great to watch in this film were the special-effects, especially the disaster scenes with the meteors hitting the earth. They were spectacular. A few of the panoramic scenes in here were beautiful, too. (This is a must for widescreen DVD.)
There is a good mix of humor in this adventure thriller. That humor makes some of the characters likable, even though they are still unrealistically sleazy heroes. Steve Buscemi had most of the good comedic lines. I liked Billy Bob Thornton as the NASA boss. He's very interesting to watch. Bruce Willis plays his normal macho-hero role. His heroic effort in the end is nicely sentimental. The special-effects, as mentioned earlier, were perhaps the best right in the first 5-10 minutes of the film - a real attention-grabber right off the bat. Actually, the first half of this film is far better than the second half.
