CAT. 8 (2013)

Truly Dreadful Film

i must have seen a different film!!

Good movie but grossly overrated

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

A masterpiece of classic juvenile science fiction. Captures the pure joy and innocence of those glorious summer afternoon porch swing reads of youth. Excellent casting, special effects, and overall outstanding production values provide an easy and thoroughly enjoyable and healing suspension of belief adventure. I am researching the production crew to find other similar productions. The 10 line review minimum seems somewhat heavy handed. I personally appreciate quality over quantity. Having just finished the movie, I am simply trying to capture the good feelings from my youth that the movie gave me, as simply and honestly as possible. I simply hope that others will see the movie and come away similarly happy. To my surprise, it appears my line counting English teacher of my youth has also invaded my revelries. Alas, even now I still have mandatory lines to complete. My cat seemed to enjoy the soundtrack as it snoozed near by. Hopefully, this will be line 10 -- yes!

My review is very unfair because I have only seen the first half. It is extremely formulaic - the only smart guy is in disgrace, and has a beautiful, plucky daughter (don't they always?); the ESTABLISHMENT is full of weasels who are interfering with solving the problem, and the science is beyond ludicrous. But hey, it's good dumb fun. I wouldn't wait in line to see it, nor make space in my busy schedule, nor pay extra, but as a filler after you need to "come down" from an episode of Breaking Bad, if you like B-grade sci fi and/or disaster movie stuff, it works just fine. Strangely, the acting isn't all that bad. On the one hand, there are rug-chewing villains (the slime literally rolls off the "Secretary" whose self-serving unwillingness to listen to scientific advice causes the catastrophe; the hero's ex-wife's new husband is an unrelenting sleaze, etc.) But scientist/hero Modine is quite good in his role, and the scientist who unleashed the disaster (under pressure from the "Secretary") is actually pretty good too, coming across as sort of a normal person (well, normal for someone who has just destroyed the planet). Anyway, in the "good dumb fun" category I give this high marks. Others have compared it to "Eve of Destruction" and like "Eve" I have only seen one half, but will gladly view the second halves when the opportunity arises.

Out of the four mini-series personally viewed in the past two weeks airing on the SyFy channel, CAT.8 is better than Ring of Fire(though at least that had Terry O'Quinn) and especially the irredeemably terrible Meteor with Christopher Lloyd. But of the four the best was Eve of Destruction, although that was a long way from great that looked reasonably good and at least four of the actors were convincing. CAT.8 also has some better-than-average acting, Matthew Modine is a commendable lead, and the production values(apart from some hokey effects) are reasonable, basic though with some signs of atmospheric. On the whole however CAT.8 doesn't work. What really lets things down is the story and the science. To say that the science is questionable is an understatement in itself, if anything it is a disaster, so bad that experts would feel tempted to bail out halfway through the first half. It honestly sounded like the writers were making things up with no research and it was very difficult to believe any of it. As a result the story was implausible and had little if any credibility. Unfortunately also for the story it didn't feel enough to sustain the three hours, so it felt like a thin structure interwoven with a lot of padding, ham-fisted melodrama/exposition, underdeveloped sub-plotting and an overlong length. If you think the first half takes too long to get going and is implausible, wait until you see the second half, like with the Meteor, Ring of Fire and even Eve of Destruction it gets increasingly dull and illogical. The script is underwritten, cheesy and very awkward, another one of those instances where it came through clearly that the writers hadn't properly checked to see whether what they'd written and given the actors made sense. The music is turgid and unmemorable, the pacing is pedestrian and stretches the story out too much, the characters are nowhere near developed enough which is inexcusable for a mini-series of this length and generally CAT.8 feels under-directed and characterless. On the whole, there is worse out there but this was rather poor stuff, the best assets are the production values and the acting but the story, script, pacing and especially the science bog things down considerably. 3/10 Bethany Cox

I agree completely with Ed Blackadder's review. Why is it so very difficult for the writers of scripts that pretend to be "science" fiction to ask even a serious amateur science enthusiast to review their scripts (I'd do it for free) to catch their innumerable errors and misrepresentations of natural phenomenon? Did the writers of this bad joke sleep through their grade school and high school science classes? Apparently. And they must also believe that everyone else did, too.If you are a SCIENCE fiction fan, you'll want to skip this one unless you want to watch for a few laughs. However, that probably won't hold you through the entire show. I stopped watching to write this after the hilariously wrong satellite sequence about 20 minutes in. Gawd...