As a movie made for TV, Meltdown isn't a complete dismal failure, but even with the minimal budget, barely any actors with ability and a ridiculous premise I still expected it to at least make some kind of sense. Annoyingly this starts out OK; a large asteroid is hurtling towards earth and an agency has set up an orbiting 10 megaton warhead as a countermeasure for just this type of thing. One of the operators notices an anomaly and wants to abort but he's told to proceed as normal. The warhead is fired, hits its target but fails to destroy the object. Instead it breaks into 3 large pieces. The largest piece, which we're advised is the size of Iceland, is set to collide with earth. Instead of creating the extinction level event that's expected, the piece hits earth's atmosphere and bounces off, however the impact has managed to jolt the earth out of orbit, (yes you read that right), and it's predicted that over the coming week the temperatures will increase to around 150 degrees Fahrenheit or 65 degrees Celsius. As the earth starts to fry in the sudden global heatwave, fires break out in various parts of the world, water is in short supply, widespread lootings are afoot and police detective, Casper Van Dien, along with his family, set off for the airport in the hope of reaching the Arctic. The rest of the movie is a random mix of events that plague their attempts to get any respite from the soaring temperatures. Needless to say, they never make it to a plane and therefore, never get to the Arctic, but for some reason, certain doom is avoided by way of magnetic pull from planetary alignment, or some such rubbish, the earth manages to sort itself out, rain cools everything down, I puke, the end. To say that this movie doesn't make sense and falls completely off the rails is a vast understatement. Despite the highly questionable and implausible science, the actions of all concerned just don't make any logical sense. One of the characters, who happens to be the technician who was against firing the nuke in the first place is carrying a portable temperature reader and even though it's readings are increasing and around 140 degrees, everyone is still wearing jackets or long sleeves, no one is wearing a hat, only one person passes out even though none of them have had the water necessary to continue and none of them appear to be sweating all that much. It's hot enough to cause cars to overheat and spontaneously combust but not hot enough for anyone to roll up their sleeves or discard their jackets apparently. Forest fires make sense, looting and rioting and killing for water also makes sense, but at 60 degrees Celsius there's going to be very little running or fighting going on as it'd be virtually impossible to breathe adequately by this time for that type of action, clothing would be at a minimum and the group would've died from heatstroke or organ failure 5-10 degrees earlier from being out in the open. There'd be widespread flooding from icemelt, all permafrost would be in thaw and with no water pressure left to fight fires, that would make ground temperature even hotter. All of that however is moot, seeing as any object large enough to knock earth from orbit would also destroy the earth on impact, but if that happened we wouldn't have a bad movie to laugh at. Budget constraints shouldn't be an excuse to forgo the simple research that would at least make movies like this more enjoyable and slightly more logical in its progression even if the chain of events that caused it are impossible. This'll be OK for a late night movie on TV, but it isn't worth going out of your way for.

Once again, Vancouver -- The king of schlocky Canadian 'made for TV' movies has done it again. Yet another movie made as a tax write-off for wealthy or semi-wealthy investors. Gotta hide that money somewhere, eh fat cats? As for the movie; It was made to be bad and to lose money (for tax loss purposes) and on that level I applaud it. It's certainly a terrible movie and I have to hand it to the producers -- they accomplished everything they set out to make; a terrible money-losing movie. Bravo! Well done!---------------------------------The British Columbia Production Services Tax Credit (PSTC) encourages film, television and animation production in BC and is available to either international or Canadian productions produced in British Columbia.There are four components:The basic PSTC tax credit is 33% of qualified BC labour expenditures incurred after February 28, 2010.The REGIONAL tax credit is 6% of qualified BC labour expenditures of the corporation pro-rated by the number of days of principal photography in BC outside of the designated Vancouver area to the total days of principal photography in BC. The new DISTANT Location tax credit is 6% and is added to the regional tax credit for principal photography done outside of the Lower Mainland Region, north of Whistler and east of Hope, excluding the Capital Regional District. DIGITAL ANIMATION or VISUAL EFFECTS tax credit is 17.5% of BC labour expenditures directly attributable to digital animation or visual effects activities.

Although the idea was interesting, I was expecting it to be worse considering it was low budget. In my opinion, Meltdown: Days of Destruction is neither bad or good as an overall film, though it has assets that fall in both categories. What I did like about the film was that the acting was surprisingly better than average. Amanda Crew is beautiful and not too bland, Vincent Gale and Stefanie Von Pfetton are good and Casper Van Dien does his best to make his performance more than just a good-looking guy with non-existent acting skills which is something that has been plaguing a number of low-budget films I've seen in recent memory. I did also like the nice settings and the editing wasn't too choppy, while the music is not too over-bearing. The concept is also an interesting one. However, there are things that don't work. The most exciting Meltdown: Days of Destruction gets is towards the end, but around the middle it is rather sluggish and generic with predictable storytelling, very unlikely science and cheesy dialogue. The effects are minimal and while I have seen cheaper ones, in all honesty the effects here are not great in look(especially the meteor) and don't generate any sorts of thrills. The characters I didn't really engage with, some of them don't have much to do and the types of characters involved are reminiscent of the obligatory clichés you'd find in a SyFy original disaster movie. All in all, not a complete meltdown but not particularly much to it either. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Meltdown opens on a scene of scientists preparing to conduct an important test on a missile system developed to deflect asteroids should they be on a collision course with earth. Nathan (Vincent Gale) mentions some misgivings to his, but the test appears to be an unqualified success. Then the asteroid breaks apart, and the largest piece is pushed into a direct collision path with earth. Fortunately, the huge rock skips off of earth's outer atmosphere and ricochets into space. Unfortunately, the glancing blow is just enough to alter earth's orbit, and the planet begins to spiral closer to the sun.While all of this is going on above their heads, Los Angeles cops Tom (Casper Van Dien) and Mick (Greg Anderson) are on a stake-out. They're supposed to collect evidence against a suspected drug dealer, but the deal they're watching quickly devolves into a shooting match. Afterward, Tom takes a few minutes to be interviewed by a local television reporter who also happens to be his girlfriend, Carly (Stefanie von Pfetten).At a nearby hospital where Mick is treated for a minor injury, Tom has a brief chat with his ex-girlfriend Bonnie (Venus Terzo), who is a nurse. He tells her he's concerned about the fact that their 17 year-old daughter Kimberly (Amanda Crew) is dating a man named CJ (Ryan McDonell). Once Tom explains to Bonnie that he's discovered CJ has a criminal record, she's a little worried herself.It's not long, however, before everybody has something else to worry about. The temperature is rapidly rising all around the world. Carly is one of the first non-scientists to learn what's really happening. Nathan, who is her brother, calls her to say he may have a way that they can survive. Carly calls Tom; he, of course, promptly contacts Bonnie.In relatively short order, the motley group is on the road. Before they can reach their ultimate goal, however, they've got to make their way through bands of looters, deal with a catastrophic water shortage, and manage to travel in temperatures that are high enough to kill.Casper Van Dien is a good looking guy, and I actually enjoyed him in Starship Troopers. That may be because he's good in action scenes. It might also be because he didn't talk much in that movie. In Meltdown, he's unfortunately given just enough lines in situations that are just dramatic enough to showcase his entirely average acting abilities. Amanda Crew is also okay, and Ryan McDonell isn't bad, either. Vincent Gale and Stefanie von Pfetten are also both reasonably good, but Venus Terzo is sadly on a par with Van Dien.What really makes or breaks a movie, though, is the story and the script. While the story here is okay and actually has some real potential, the script is just awful. The science part of the science fiction is non-existent starting with the asteroid pushing the earth out of orbit and escalating with the notion that the "gravitational balance of the solar system" might "pull the earth back" into its usual orbit "over time." When the temperature in LA hits 120 degrees, cars start blowing up.You know what's even worse than the bad science? The bad continuity. Okay, really hot. Why are people in the movie not only wearing long sleeved shirts, but jackets, too? Why are people mugging each other for bottled water instead of turning on the taps at home? Why are the streets completely empty, but the freeways completely full? And why are the freeways full of unexploded? It's almost superfluous to note that the sets, costumes, and production values were good, especially when that only forces me to say that the edits were not.So basically, you take a pretty good story idea and combine it with mostly mediocre acting, a terrible script, low-end special effects, utterly irrational plot twists, and poor edits, and what do you have? A movie that's even less than the sum of its inconsiderable parts. I'm sorry to say that I can't recommend Meltdown: Days of Destruction to anyone.POLITICAL NOTES: There is mention here that Congress finally loosened the purse strings enough to fund the tests that start the movie rolling. While the tests here were wholly irresponsible (targeting an asteroid with a nuke and not knowing the composition of the big rock is, in fact, well beyond irresponsible and approaching the insane), the fact is that such scenarios are a very real danger to the planet. Unfortunately, we've tracked nowhere near all of the near earth asteroids that could be worrisome in some orbit some day; and our ability to spot something on a collision course with us is limited at best.Once we do discover we're going to be hit, we quite literally have no system in place to deal with it. There are no nuclear-tipped space missiles we can launch; the space shuttle is completely incapable of going beyond earth orbit, and if it were, we couldn't launch enough of them or launch them quickly enough for it to matter. I'm not big on the government doing anything beyond its constitutional mandates, but I certainly think protecting the planet from destruction coming at us from outer space could be construed as defending the country, don't you? FAMILY SUITABILITY: Meltdown: Days of Destruction is rated R for "some violence." I frankly didn't find the violence here anything beyond a fairly typical T-rated video game. If your teens are keen on seeing Meltdown and you can't talk them out of it, the R-rating shouldn't dissuade you from letting them see it. It's not, however, a good idea to leave the younger kids in the room with their elder siblings. While the shootings aren't too graphic in the main, some of the dead bodies are.