Super Tanker (2011)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Imagine a film company that gets its ideas from Asylum, but lacks their budget and writing skill. Also titled "Battle Tanker" is a horrendous film on all accounts.A substance from a meteor lands in Alaska and is fabricated into a doomsday bomb that becomes unstable if moved too quickly through the earth's magnetic field. Following some plot continuity issues, it was decided to dump this device into the Marianas Trench by way of a huge tanker. In route the tanker has issues with "rogue waves" which causes the device known as ICE-10 to become unstable.This leads to a venting of a deadly cloud. The civilians are at odds with the military as to how to handle the unstable device. This creates added drama. The science behind the whole film was terrible, as was the less than fifth grade knowledge of nuclear reactors on part of the writers.They did manage to eliminate Asylums' problem with Navy insignias by not using any at all.No-f-bombs, sex, or nudity

SUPER TANKER has to be the worst SyFy Channel-funded movie ever. Even the title is boring. This is the pits, worse even than all the dodgy disaster movies they make and the monster flicks combined. The plot involves some nuclear cloud that has the power to form and destroy whatever it comes into contact with, and there's a lot of stuff on ships with various officious types ranting and struggling to prevent a disaster and to cover the whole thing up before anybody finds out.The film's leads are vacuous and wooden and the whole thing is only notable for the familiar actors they've roped into appearing; David Schofield and Ben Cross must have been really hard up to agree to star in this nonsense. The special effects of the cloud are just about adequate but the various CGI ships and helicopters are appalling indeed. I like the way the scriptwriter plays casual racism for laughs, nice touch there bud. Just kidding...SUPER TANKER is a real mess and has no redeeming features whatsoever.

Usually only I am to blame for our "B" movie choices. My wife rolls her eyes at the latest turkey I have wasted time and hard-earned money on, but this one was her idea! It really is surely one of the most preposterously bad movies ever made in the hallowed annals of bad movies. It starts out well enough, a meteor falls to earth somewhere and scientists extract "dark matter" from it. It's downhill on a roller coaster from there.Several of the cast have a reasonable pedigree, they don't look as if they are desperate to get in any movies going. So I can't see why they bothered to show up for this dud. To be fair, some of them did their best with the atrocious script and ludicrous "psudo science" (if that's what it was) The scene where they were all frantically tapping away on their laptops trying to "reconfigure a blank install" or whatever they called it had all the tension of three friends sitting in an internet café. When one of them announced "I can't hold it much longer, we're losing field integrity," I briefly recalled the original Star Trek and half fancied Scotty should make an appearance "The engines canna take much more, Cap'n" but that would have been too much to wish for.The characters were mostly clichés. The Chinese man, played by someone called Jacky Woo, isn't even listed on the IMDb entry for cast (probably a wise career move on his part) His English was incomprehensible to anyone other than his two team mates, and the running gag of having the head of the military unit ask "What the hell did he just say?" was funny once, but got tired with over use.Don't worry, I won't give away the "plot" (was there one?) The super tanker in the title seemed to have been mainly stock footage with a few scenes that my wife swears were shot with a plastic model floating in a large tank.Even so, I laughed my head off throughout and enjoyed it in a perverse sort of way. Oh, and my wife? She slept from the first appearance of the "death cloud" until the end.

As someone who loves Sci-Fi and who doesn't much care for the Sci-Fy channel's TV movies, I was very impressed to have my expectations upgraded slightly watching this film. The CG was certainly tolerable, acting considerably above what I expected, minus a few instances, and the music tracks were surprisingly well done to fit the scenes. Even the dialog was delivered believably in most instances. After having watched nearly 4-5 movies a week for almost 30 years I DO often judge books by their cover (Release information, budget and reviews included) when it comes to movies. Especially since IMDb came into existence. I gave it a 5 only because I remained interested the entire time and was actually surprised that I wasn't able to fully predict certain outcomes of various scenes.It's not a smashing success but at least it doesn't insult your intelligence, make you squirm with eye-rolling incredulity, or bore you to the point of angry disinterest. It may be a 'B' film, yet it stands high on the shoulders of what is most often produced by the Sci-Fy channel. I would honestly recommend it for a rainy day.