Rent Global Meltdown (2017)

Global Meltdown review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

There’s a quaint charm to the covers of such direct-to-video/TV-movies of natural disasters. There’s great ambition to pursue such a project considering it takes a lot of special effects to make such a spectacle work. And clearly, Global Meltdown does not have the budget for it. But just look at the cover! Look how much wild imagination is present within this one image that was doubt hoped for in this Canadian TV movie on a budget. It wouldn’t surprise me if the poster was made first and then they made the movie afterward.

So, yeah, Global Meltdown is about the world ending. There’s a handful of survivors that includes a helicopter pilot and a scientist who…

Say, did you know that producer Roger Corman used to pull that poster trick? It’s true! He’d make up some cool art for a poster and then slap them up in cinemas to see what passersby would think of them. If he noted enough interest in a poster, he’d then pursue making that picture around the expectation. It’s pretty ballsy and a pretty unique way to go about making a film. His movies were mostly B-movies but Corman certainly made a lot of them.

Okay, sorry, back to Global Meltdown. The pilot and scientist get a whole group of survivors and they have to band together to find a safe haven in…

You know, this sounds a lot like that movie 2012. It even has that similar element of the crazy at Yellowstone Park who has prepared for the worst when the tectonic shifts. Wow, remember that film? It came out in 2009 which seems kinda cutting it close to be a film about theorizing about the apocalypse. An apocalypse, mind you, that we all thought would happen because of the Mayan calendar never being finished past that date in time.

Yes, back to the movie. So the survivors stumble around some disasters and accidents that are really unimpressive even by TV standards in 2017. Soon they discover that…

You know, it’s funny that the 2012 apocalypse seems a little bit like the Y2K hysteria. Except the whole deal with Y2K is that it was more of a manmade error in entering data with two digits instead of four. A lot of people thought it was a hoax since nothing happened but there were actually some small issues that occurred with it. As an example, some medical equipment that wasn’t properly calibrated in the middle east. The whole history of Y2K was that the initial programming of…

Yeah, I know I’m avoiding talking about the movie but that’s only because it’s unceasingly boring. I wish I could say the effects were no hum-drum but they are. I wish the acting was a genuine surprise but its not. I wish the thrills were there but they’re absent. There’s just not much to say about a film this passive that was clearly made to meet a quota. Another film for the pile of dime-store disaster movies, soon to be bundled in a big set of 50 movies for wicked cheap.