Crew
Director/Photography – Noah Luke, Screenplay – Lauren Pritchard & Joe Roche, Producer – David Michael Latt, Music – Tim Carlos & Mikael Shane Prather, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Production Design – Charlie Harris. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Joseph Michael Harris (Captain Evan Davis), Anthony Jensen (Dr. Rick Edwards), Patrick Labyorteaux (General Ferris), Karan Sagoo (Captain Mills), Caroline Williams (Captain Stiles), Kennedy Porter (Jacobs), Sharon Desiree (Staff Sergeant J. Crane), Eva Ceja (Captain Laura Williams), Maxi Witrack (Turner), Natalie Storrs (Lisa Davis)
Plot
At Goddard Observatory in California, astronomers detect a meteor three times the size of Mount Everest on a collision course with Earth in six days’ time. Outliers from the swarm start to strike. Various countries around the world come together to activate the Doomsday Protocol and fire an array of lasers against the meteorite. However, this does nothing because the meteor is found to be made of mostly iron. An emergency crew of volunteer astronauts is gathered by the Space Force to man a crew to land on the meteor and plant missiles that will deflect its path. However, the journey there is one fraught with many perils.
Since the early 2000s, the low-budget US production company The Asylum has been known for their output of Mockbusters – films that come out with titles intended to mimic those of big-budget releases in the hope that people will mistake them or not look too closely. In between these, they essentially created the Gonzo Killer Shark film, as popularised by their bad movie hit Sharknado (2013), and have made an assortment of monster films and disaster movies.
The disaster movie has become the province of the Syfy Channel and other channels during the latter half of the 2000s through the 2010s-20s. In this time, there have been a great many cheap and usually formulaic efforts churned out. (For a more detailed listing of these see my essay Disaster Movies). The Asylum has dabbled in a number of these with efforts that include the likes of 2012: Doomsday (2007), The Apocalypse (2007), 2012 Supernova (2009), Titanic II (2009), Arctic Apocalypse (2019), 2012: Ice Age (2011), 100° Below 0 (2012), 500 MPH Storm (2013), Airplane vs Volcano (2013), Age of Ice (2014), Asteroid vs Earth (2014), San Andreas Quake (2015), Geo-Disaster (2017), Oceans Rising (2017), Apocalypse of Ice (2020), Asteroid-a-Geddon (2020), Collision Earth (2020), Titanic 666 (2022), 20.0 Megaquake (2022), Arctic Armageddon (2023), Continental Split (2024), Earthquake Underground (2024) and Planetquake (2024).
A sizeable number of disaster movies centre around oncoming asteroid/comet/meteor impacting with Earth. These started with the tv movie A Fire in the Sky (1978) and the big-budget Meteor (1979) back in the heyday of the original disaster movie fad. Others have included Asteroid (tv mini-series, 1997), Doomsday Rock (tv movie, 1997), Deep Impact (1998), Judgment Day (1999), Deadly Skies/Force of Impact (2006), Impact (tv mini-series, 2008), Meteor (tv mini-series, 2009), Meteor Apocalypse (2010), Meteor Storm (2010), Asteroid vs Earth, Impact Earth (2015), Meteor Assault (2015), Greenland (2020), Asteroid-a-Geddon and Meteor: First Impact (2022), plus the hilariously satiric Don’t Look Up (2021).
The plot of Doomsday Meteor is essentially a B-budget Armageddon (1998). There is the same plot in both of an oncoming meteor and a quickly assembled space mission launched to go and plant missiles to divert it. Doomsday Meteor has on board Joe Roche and his writing partner Lauren Pritchard. Roche has been behind some of The Asylum’s best films and has scripted the likes of Collision Earth (2020), Meteor Moon (2020), Alien Conquest (2021), Devil’s Triangle (2021), Robotapocalypse (2021), Planet Dune (2021), Battle for Pandora (2022), 4 Horsemen: Apocalypse (2022), Moon Crash (2022), Methgator (2023), Transmorphers: Mech Beasts (2023), Continental Split (2024), Pandora: Fire and Ice (2025) and Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs (2025). In these, Roche has an amazing ability to come up almost believable-sounding scientific explanations for the most far-fetched ideas.
Expectedly when it comes to Doomsday Meteor, Roche sciences the shit out of the scenario again. There is a lot of discussion about the credible means for the rocket launching and landing on the meteor. There is a particularly vivid sequence where Maxi Witrack goes EVA to repair a hole in the ship during the midst of a debris swarm, loser her welder and sacrifices her life so that the polymers of her spacesuit can fuse in the heat and block the hole. One of the drawbacks of Roche’s wild ideas is that they are relayed in B-budget surrounds. Here the ambitious scope of the film loses its credibility when we get to the surface of the meteor and it is just Earth-standard gravity. At this point, the proceedings simply become routine B-budget space adventure.
Noah Luke had previously worked for The Asylum as a cinematographer. He made his directorial debut with Jungle Run (2021) and went on to direct Attack on Titan (2022), Moon Crash (2022), Battle for Pandora (2022) and Thor: God of Thunder (2022) for them.
Trailer here