Last Sunday night I happened to catch a few minutes of a made-for-TV movie on ABC called “Impact“.   It was about a meteor shower that hid “a rogue asteroid” which hit the Moon and pushed it closer to Earth.  This new elliptical orbit caused all kinds of problems, and it looked neat to see the Moon up close to the Earth.

The tagline of the movie is: “Get ready to experience the dark side of the moon!”  Obviously that can be taken as a pun, but perhaps the movie also means to portray the Moon as evil.  The plot twist is that the Moon is going to crash into the Earth in 39 days, and unless man can stop it, all life on the planet will be destroyed.

I didn’t see a lot of the movie, but even what I saw had some difficult-to-believe moments (and I like science fiction movies).  The main problem I had with it was that people and objects (as heavy as trains) would sometimes float into the air.   They could’ve explained that as the Moon’s gravity competing with the Earth’s, but they said it was due to some electromagnetic effect resulting from the meteors / asteroids.   I’m not sure how electromagnetism makes people float away, but that’s what happens in the movie.

There were also numerous cliché-type moments in the movie, which can get old.   But what kept my interest was when the scientists / astronomers said the Moon was going to crash into the Earth.  What will they do about that?  The obvious answer is to blow it up.   Once the plot thickened to this consistency, I started watching more.   Unfortunately, it was “to be continued”, and will finish this next Sunday at 8pm CST.  I figure they won’t blow it up, but it is an interesting idea.

The idea of blowing up the Moon is not my idea — I remember seeing an online petition to blow up the Moon.   (I wonder who started that, and why.)  But I have explained on numerous occasions that the Moon is broken, and something needs to be done to fix it.  (Follow that link for a full explanation, and there are several trackbacks in the comments leading to further discussion on this subject.)

FYI, there are two links at the IMDb page for watching the movie, but I haven’t tried using them.