I see meteors!
Uh-oh! The survival of the planet Earth rests in the hands of one person: Marla Sokoloff!
And due to circumstances way beyond her control, she's having a devil of a time transporting a laptop -- the only one in the whole world that contains the proper coordinates for heading off an asteroid that's 60 miles in diameter and headed straight for us -- to her boss, a rocket scientist (honest!) played by Jason Alexander.
They're just two of the stars of Meteor, a two-part, four-hour summer blockbuster miniseries premiering Sunday (7/12, 9 p.m. eastern) on NBC. This movie is surprisingly suspenseful (I watched a preview DVD provided by the network), given that we have been conditioned to expect network TV summer miniseries to be somewhat below the standards of made-for-TV movies that air during the regular season.
Not so with Meteor. In scheduling Meteor for two consecutive summer Sundays (Part Two airs on July 19), perhaps NBC was adopting the practice of movie studios, which save their big special-effects productions for summer release.
Whatever the backstory, Meteor is the kind of end-of-the-world disaster movie that looks and sounds great on a big flat-screen TV. And it boasts a huge cast of reliable, bankable stars: Sokoloff (seen in recurring roles on Desperate Housewives and The Practice), Alexander (beloved as George Costanza on Seinfeld), Billy Campbell (The 4400), Michael Rooker (as scary here as he was in "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"), the legendary Stacy Keach, Christopher Lloyd (of the "Back to the Future" movies and Taxi), among many others.
What happens in Meteor? If we told you it would spoil the whole thing, right? Suffice it to say: The government team in charge of blasting dangerous objects hurtling to earth out of the sky needs those coordinates. Will they get them in time? The answer: Maybe.
While we wait to find out, debris from the runaway asteroid is already wreaking havoc in cities around the world. Meteor is definitely worth a look when it crash lands on Sunday night.
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Comments (10)
lame
I am looking forward to seeing it!
I'll probably watch this!
Will give it a look, hope it does not go the way Impact did.
Looks interesting might give it a look
looking forward to this
Sorry -- I see that spelling was "elahoda." My error.AB
To "elohada": Please don't be leary. These other means of communicating that you cite in your comment here are not available to this young woman in the miniseries because the planet and its atmosphere are already being bombarded with smaller but lethal pieces of debris that have knocked out satellites in orbit and data and voice transmission facilities on the ground. That's why she has to take the laptop physically to this government facility. -- AB
Just added it to my tivo!
"And due to circumstances way beyond her control, she's having a devil of a time transporting a laptop -- the only one in the whole world that contains the proper coordinates for heading off an asteroid that's 60 miles in diameter and headed straight for us -- to her boss"Seriously? She has no phone or email to speak of? how about just word of mouth... post-its??Already I'm leery.