There are times when I am critical of low budget television films, but all those occasions pale into insignificance and are eclipsed by this indescribable 2 hours of purgatory.Ham acting doesn't begin to describe these wooden characters, half of whom can't decide whether they are English actors trying to be Americans, or vice versa, as all the accents sound forced and so totally wrong.The action moves between not only locations, but entire countries, with amazing speed and terrible scene changing.The physical locations are abysmal in their lack of authenticity. Living as I do, not a stones throw from the 'real' Stonehenge, it was almost laughable to see an 'English' primary school look so much like its US counterpart, not to mention the forest which has suddenly grown up around the stones overnight. Land rovers driven by pseudo English army personnel suddenly become left hand drive vehicles and nuking this ancient site, without it affecting anything else around it, seems to be at the top of everyone's agenda.The end was about as credible as the rest of the film, although by then I had given up watching and was listening from another room!

I'm happy that this movie has not disproved my theory. The theory is that with the possible exception of 2001, there never has been a decent science fiction movie. This is as bad as most of them. Actually I was planning on a 5 vote until the va-va-varoom-bang-bang-I-missed car chase/gun fight. That bumped it down to a 4. Then when I found out that it was shot in British Columbia but set in Maine (!!!)I dropped it again to a still overly generous 3. What we have here is essentially a "Hey gang, let's save the planet" movie with a simplistic, cliché ridden, illogical, predictable plot and stock cardboard characters. Hey... That hard-ass American general was a classic. But he must have been a really important dude because he made all the life and death decisions in Great Britain. I suppose watching it was better than standing out in the snowstorm that raged outside. But not much.

The premise is actually intelligent and exciting, and if the people who took the idea were more talented and had a bigger budget, they could have made a good movie. But they had none of these things and the result is a ridiculous and boring film. It's a classic case of limited talents overreaching. The science often didn't add up, the sets were cheap, the locations were unconvincing, the action scenes were boring, the special effects were mostly poor, and the actors often couldn't get their accents right. Where are the makers of Godzilla when we need them? Their films, while cheap and tacky, were at least fun. But this is a joyless trip in spite of its end-of-the-world stakes. I never believed it for a minute.

Just to get this straight, I have absolutely nothing against Syfy Originals in general. Mostly, they're refreshingly irony-free throwbacks to classic drive-in b-movies and those giant monster flicks that Hollywood and independent studios alike tend to neglect. This one, however, was quite different, and not necessarily for the best.I guess my biggest issue, aside from the absolutely worthless protagonist, was the presentation of the story. An amazingly large part of the movie consists of very little more than a group of scientists *observing* the actual location of interest via monitors and meters. They analyze the data and discuss the mysterious threat that's supposed to be rising by the minute with as much melodrama as possible, but the fact remains that all we see is people *talking* about a dangerous situation from a safe distance. It hampers the sense of tension that's needed for a "Countdown to Doomsday" movie to work. It's not necessarily boring as much as it feels like a distraction from what *should* be the real focus, namely the actual sites of the strange phenomena. There are exceptions, of course; some of the later action scenes and special effects sequences really are pretty well executed for a TV movie, but they're only a minuscule portion of the whole.All in all, "Stonehenge Apocalypse" is one of the weaker Syfy Originals I've seen. It's undeniably much more coherent and serious than many of the others, but it thoroughly lacks true excitement and tension. The fact that most of its major plot devices are mere references to established real world pseudo-sciences, inelegantly thrown in there like quotes from their respective Wikipedia articles, certainly doesn't help.