Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

trupinoy1 Superb job of director Robert Iscove and his crew portraying this film, along with a notable lineup of actors and actress'. Acting and the plot was impressive, giving the audience a sense of realism without being too overly dramatic or Hollywoodish. Compared to other movies utilizing the newsroom to introduce the plot, this by far surpasses most. I can see how this movie when first aired how people mistook it for being genuine. In a sense I would consider this a modern 90's era mindset reaction of people and a paranoid nation in response to a first encounter to Earth. A good comparison for this film would be when H.G. Well's broadcasted his War of the World over live radio, also depicted a true sense of realism, with the exception of this film having the perspective view from within the TV newsroom. Robert portrayed this film with such realism that easily gave the sense of an actual TV broadcast and interviews of world crisis' and headline news of before. The world definitely needs more films with this realm of realism rather than some recent films which try to portray the same sense utilizing the first person perspective with a handy cam, nauseating acting by a hokey cast, and typical overly used plot with the predictable idiotic actions of the characters, a feeble attempt to entice the audience. A good film shouldn't need to have those.

misfit320 In a time when movies and TV films are jam-packed with CGI aliens and robots and such, it was pretty interesting to see a Sci-fi movie where there's no 100% proof that it involves aliens.That being said, this film is terrible.I'll pass up on the time frame believability because they had to fit the movie into a 2 hour slot for TV, and had to jam a lot of storyline into a short amount of time. But there are so many things that would not, or could not, happen. For example, what are the chances that EWN would have a camera crew in Colombo, Sri Lanka to interview Arthur C. Clarke? And why would their science consultant end up being their co-anchor? And why would a high-ranking Pentagon officer decide to take time out from the crisis to make some glib comments on the news? Shouldn't he be doing his job? However, I will say this: great premise (especially since it was a TV movie, the news format was rather effective). It had potential to be a huge hit... but I don't think it was (I just watched this film in my astronomy class).::POSSIBLE SPOILER::In my personal opinion, they should have ended the film with the asteroids raining down on the Earth... injecting the Shakespeare quote at the end seemed... frivolous, and an attempt to be poetic. Sometimes, especially in a movie like this, you want to leave the viewer with a lump in their gut. My personal opinion.Overall, an enjoyable movie. I'd watch it again if it was on TV, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it.

Sebastian-20 Although this movie didn't have the same budget as movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon, I thought is was pretty amusing. It's not the special-effects or the beautiful pictures that makes this little film interesting, but the fact that the story is told in the format of a live TV-news broadcast. One of the big American TV-stations follows every minute that the asteroids come closer to earth live, and they used a real newsreader which makes it pretty realistic. These asteroids will hit the earth in 3 places all on the same latitude (43th, I believe), the USA (Midwest), southern France and Northern China. The countries which have access to nuclear missiles combine forces in order to save the world, before thousands of asteroids will hit the earth....

Eric-62-2 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.