Planetquake

When I sat down to watch the 2024 movie "Planetquake", I had never heard about it. And I figured that chances were high that this would be a movie from none other than The Asylum. And true enough, it is The Asylum that was behind this movie. And with that fact, I have to admit that I didn't really harbor much of any grand expectations to the movie. But I still opted to watch it, and give writer and director Monroe Robertson the benefit of the doubt.

Truth be told, then every now and again The Asylum do spew out movies that actually are worthwhile watching.

The storyline from writer and director Monroe Robertson is pretty straightforward, playing on every single generic trope of the natural disaster genre. So, while he was playing it safe, you know what you are in for here, for better or worse. It did, however, make for a somewhat generic viewing experience, as there wasn't anything thrilling or new brought to the genre of natural disaster movies.

The acting performances in "Planetquake" were actually fair, taking into consideration the premise of the script and storyline. There were a couple of familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Michael Paré, Erica Duke and Phillip Andre Botello. Yep, I've seen enough dubious low budget movies to be familiar with Erica Duke and Phillip Andre Botello.

20 minutes into the movie, Dr. Milly Anderson (played by Erica Duke) said, and I kid you not, "How can we slow the tectonic plates?" The premise of that sentence is just so ludicrous. And that is pretty much the epitome of the writing skills here.

The effects in "Planetquake" are all over the place. Some of the effects are downright of questionable and laughable, and you don't really buy into the disastrous events that takes place, because the effects are so wooden and rigid. But other effects actually look good and somewhat realistic enough, which makes this movie somewhat of a jumble of emotions because of the effects. And I love how localized some of the earthquakes are, totally annihilating one building but not a scratch on the adjacent buildings.

The intentions to make a grand scale disaster movie was definitely there, I will give writer and director Monroe Robertson that much. Just how well it was accomplished on the screen, well that is a whole other story.

Ultimately, then "Planetquake" turned out as I expected it to, for better or worse. I will just chalk it up as yet another run-of-the-mill movie from The Asylum watched and notched off of the list.

My rating of "Planetquake" lands on a generous four out of ten stars, as it is not the worst of dumpster fires to be spewed out by The Asylum.

I understand not having a phone on while in air but there's earthquakes, like either of you could die. I like just blatant earth ending stuff but I don't care for any of these people I don't know anything about them either. Everyone seems like they are reading the script for how calm they are.

"no star wars was a weapon imitative in the 80s" and the other dude just sort of shakes his head. What even are these conversations.

I am starting to think Adam Sandler would appear in this movie. They kept mentioning the knock-on effect which they never really fully explain. The reason other movies are good that have the same premise is because they have slow down parts for the story. But the parts for the story are only like 5 minutes long. Also we see the same helicopters in multiple scenes with minor movements between the clips.

Many of the Asylum movies pretty much are predictable in terms of the quality of the plot, the acting and the special effects, so no reason to be disappointed since going in you know it won't be Oscar worthy. Having said that, I found it entertaining enough that I feel no need to bash every aspect of it. I will say that at times it was too talky and too technical, especially when the trio of world savers were trying to figure out how to do it. I don't if I am imagining it, but it seems the character of Dr. Millie Anderson said "I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier" more than once. Her genius brother was pretty much wooden and some of the other characters felt like they were overacting or just bad actors.

Firstly, the acting is fine. They just were given a terrible script and it's hard to do much with that. If you're in the right mood, the comedic value of every most unlikely event happening in a way that defies everything science has ever taught us might be make it worthwhile.

The reality is, it feels like someone went into a class of 5 year olds and got stories about eathequakes and mashed them together for this movie. Personally, I was expecting a movie about earthquakes to have some understanding of the topic. Maybe I'm missing something!?

Animations are terrible but I quite like bad attempts that fit the theme or narrative. There just wasn't really any narrative, more a compilation of serious or disaster scenes that felt like it was made from whatever B roll the studio could pull together whether it made sense or not.

I guesw there's a place for these movies, it's just not when you want a movie that makes sense.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for this movie. At the start, it stated 25 years of movies by the Asylum. At the beginning, it was really low quality, poor special effects, and laughable scripts. Since then, some amazingly almost decent movies have come for Asylum. However, this movie harkens back to its roots. It is the sloppiness of the movie that really detracts. There is a passenger plane, shown in the air, and then on the ground, after the crash. Apparently the landing took off all the paint, and made it look like an abandoned fuselage. And rescue crews apparently working on the natural disaster in Seattle were from Germany, based on the words on the back of the uniform. Feuerwehr, meaning fire department. One has a woman who is in charge of earthquake monitoring, and her husband is in the military, and her brother is no where to be found, after leaving a top secret government project, but he holds the key to solving the life ending disaster that happened when a mission went wrong. Oh, and her daughter was on the plane that crashed. Fortunately I was able to stream this movie, so I could take frequent breaks to get away from the nonsense. I am giving it three stars as the fault lies with the budget and the script, not the performances.