Without Warning (1994)

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Screen and theater acting techniques may bode well toward establishing a sense of drama within a realm where clearcut emotions, facial expressions, and unnaturally fluent speech patterns may enhanced form of medium clearly intended toward entertainment value, but in terms of attempting to emulate real-life behaviors, these methodologies almost always fall flat.Thus, therein lies the essence of the problems with this movie, notwithstanding the problems with its storyline, in that the melodramatic clichés, overemotional expressions, unbroken sentence structures and laughable bits of overacting send this movie's pretensions toward realism crashing to the ground with greater impact than the "asteroids" that serve as its subject matter.Notice how the news anchors maintain persistent eye contact with the camera, never glancing downward to look at their notes, as they are clearly reciting lines from a perfectly memorized and persistently rehearsed script. Seeking the all too recognizable imperfections of everyday conversation, such as "um"s, "yknow"s, apprehensive pauses or even so much as a broken sentence? You won't find it here, as "Without Warning"s depiction of "real life" clearly emits within an alternate universe where every bit of every day conversation is uttered with stringent adherence to grammatical correctness, exaggerated fluctuations in tone clearly designed to emphasize the character's ever present mental status and overzealous emotional expressions, lest the content of one's speech fail to properly clarify one's state of mind for the intellectually impaired.One will also notice on-site news broadcasts lacking the characteristic confinement of audio cues emitting solely from a microphone, as the camera's seem to pick up background noises and surrounding ambiance with unbelievable clarity.Minus the expressions, the behaviors of each and everyone involve serve as further reminders to the audience that they are in fact watching a movie. When spotting a girl who appears to have mysteriously been deposited at the center of a meteor impact site, the anchorwoman proceeds to "check on her" by immediately shoving the microphone in her face to record an odd verbal pattern which ultimately serves as one of the movie's preposterous "twists". No examining her. No inquiring as to whether she's okay. No muttering impressions that the child obviously appears to be in shock. Simply setting the immediate stage for a metaphorical "speech" that was clearly all too staged from the get go. At one point, an air force general holds a press conference with which to inform the public as to a series of facts which have already been established by prior broadcasts, then at the first sign of queries, holds an all too obviously "stunned" expression for several seconds, before declaring "no more questions", a gesture that practically screams out, "Yes, I'm definitely hiding something". A) Nice overacting, and B), why hold a press conference if you're essentially not going to say anything that people didn't know already? One of the most laughable bits that boasts further credentials as to the movie's propensity for melodramatics and lack of logic depicts one of the news anchors on site of the impending impact zone of another "asteroid" amidst the military's plan to demolish it before impact. As the screen brightens, he proceeds to stumble around in the midst of an hysterical panic, questioning his colleague at the news room "WHY AREN'T THEY SHOOTING AT IT???!!!!" A) A one-way ticket to the Royal Hospital For Overracting for you, sir! (consult Monty Python's Ypres sketch for more information) and B) You're colleague is a news anchor; how the F would he know? Clearly, one would need a twenty-series encyclopedia just to document every instance in which the movie's execution registers anything but the documentary-like impression that the filmmakers were striving for, but the storyline contains enough problems as it is.One scientist's perfect deductions concludes that the first two "asteroids" were deliberately deposited in sparsely populated zones in preparation for guiding the third "vehicle" to its destination, the latter of which was destroyed by what he considers our "overzealous" use of an anti-satellite missile. If these aliens needed "beacons" to land their welcome wagon, how did they manage to land the preceding probes with such precision?The scientist proceeds to berate our "aggressive" behavior as having "declared war" on an alien species, and thus the remainder of the film proceeds to further "document" their revenge. So, this intellectually superior race of extraterrestrials tossed two over-sized rocks at our planet, killed quite a number of people, yet couldn't even contemplate how a civilization on the receiving end might perceive these gestures as a threat? Kudos to the movie for conceptualizing by far the dumbest technologically advanced race ever to permeate the universe.Other illogical fallacies include the military's decision to transport the scientist in question (from within the country I might add) via F-16 (in order to naturally speed up the ETA). Clearly, given the distance traversed, the use of a fighter jet wouldn't make much of a decisive difference to merit this gesture, while the movie's ostensible implications that the jet would be cruising to its destination at top speed downplays the lack of fuel efficiency accorded the process of proceeding anywhere for considerable lengths on full afterburner.With its overpopulation of plot holes, clichés, and innumerable little cues in the field of acting that completely foil any impressions to the public that what they're seeing is "real", this pretentious attempt to cash in the mock-documentary genre couldn't have been executed more poorly if the filmmaker's had planned it that way.

The film starts off in a parallel fashion to the famous Orson Wells radio drama of 1938; opening with "ordinary programming," which is then cut in upon by a brief news bulletin that reports of meteors had struck the Earth, in three countries: France, China, and the USA. After that, this story diverges from the War of the Worlds, but bears some similarities.It was a fun idea to mix actors and actual newscasters: Sander Vanocur is the anchorman following the rapidly unfolding story, and handles the increasing level of tension in the script pretty well. Bree Walker also succeeds in blending her journalistic talent with drama. The mystery is effectively spooky, and this was, after all, like the radio play, an effort to say "Boo!" on Halloween. The interviews with people speculating on what was going on were just what you would expect if such a scenario was real. The interview with Arthur C. Clarke was intelligent, even fact-finding. The newscasters advancing on the sites of the meteor impacts was a good touch. Loud whines from the craters, burned survivors speaking in strange tongues, and the disappearance of two air force pilots: some eerily cool stuff. My favorite is the Faith, Wyoming sequence. This scene, was masterful in its simplicity. The narration by the newscaster describing the bizarre and inexplicable events there was a highlight of the sinister tone of the movie's events.The movie starts to run out of gas in the latter stages, resorting to some clichés. This may be owing to the fact it had done such an immense buildup in its realistic news cast depictions, that it had to resolve the story in the bombastic way it does. There is some dialouge that nobody would say in the context of what transpires.Even with the flaws, a good premise, skillfully executed. A fun and deliciously eerie movie.

I had high hopes for this film. The idea of a "War of the Worlds"-style fake news broadcast about an imminent asteroid impact was very intriguing. One of my favorite TV films was 1983's "Special Bulletin", which took a similar approach to the subject of nuclear terrorism.Unfortunately, this movie fails on almost all levels. The actors playing the news reporters come off like, well, actors playing news reporters. The plot points are just plain silly and melodramatic. The conclusion of the film is wretchedly insipid. In effect, the fact that humankind takes perfectly logical steps to protect ourselves from an asteroid causes super-advanced aliens to think we're too warlike for them to let us live. Or something like that.The issue of asteroid impacts is real and serious enough that we don't need television trivializing the subject with ridiculous sci-fi elements.

Before I comment on the execution of this 1994 TV movie, I'd like to say something about the unbelievably pompous sermonizing this movie does by offering this hypothetical. Suppose Captain Kirk sent an unmanned shuttle to contact a planet that had never experienced an alien contact before, and then the aliens, not having any clue what this was, then shot the shuttle down. Captain Kirk then decides this is a hostile act and decides to nuke the planet and destroy all life on it.Now if Captain Kirk did this, you'd think he was a madman and the epitomoe of all things evil. You would not as a matter of course blame the aliens for not knowing any better. So why then I ask, does this TV-movie serve up the exact same premise to us, and then deliver a scathing indictment about how this is all humanity's fault, and that our barbarism caused this, and that ultimately, as Sander Vanocur says before Washington blows up around him, "The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves"? That kind of thinking is not merely insulting to one's intelligence, it's just plain dumb. Yet for some reason, Hollywood has long had a fascination with this incredible cliche of how aliens are always wiser than humans and that any normal reaction of fear on the part of humans constitutes barbarism making destruction by the aliens justifiable (this after all is the very premise of "The Day The Earth Stood Still").Now setting aside the dumb philosophy, how does this work in terms of execution? Only so-so. I can't believe anyone would have fallen for this in a minute since it should have occurred to them to merely change channels and then remember that the last time Sander Vanocur was a serious journalist was a long time ago. But then again, the people who listened to Orson Welles long ago never had the sense to do that either so I suppose that can be forgiven. The problem with this fake newscast is that we are served up the most shallow of cliched characters to represent the different points of view in the scientific, military and political communities and you can't take them seriously for a second. This is always the greatest problem with any "fake newscast" style of drama. They spend so much time trying to make the newscasting sound authentic that in the end they forget all about trying to make the characters themselves have the ring of authenticity.As mindless entertainment this film has its merits but for chilling authenticity in a fake newscast, try to find Buffalo radio station WKBW's 1971 update of the War Of The Worlds. THAT was a drama that knew how to push all the right buttons and come off with an air of authenticity.