When Worlds Collide

April 26, 2005

Terrific premise (from the novel by Balmer and Wylie), but pretty much a dud as a film. The main problems -- a load of treacly sentimentality. Everyone is so overwhelmingly noble that the "villain" in the piece -- a wealthy if somewhat nasty man who finances the construction of a rocket to save a handful of people from the doomed Earth, as long as he can be on it -- is the only character who seems human. And the pseudo-religiosity of the final frame is off-putting. To be fair, the production values are okay, and it isn't the kind of silliness that tends to give cinema SF a bad name; it's more mediocre than terrible.