UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

one-nine-eighty I was drawn to this film, or at least my girlfriend was, upon seeing that Misha Collins was in it - she loves him in 'Supernatural' and has practically converted me into a fan too. But how would he stand up by himself, without those Winchester boys and Crowley to support him? The answer is, not that bad actually. This is your typical low budget Sy-Fy film which uses CGI to drive a usually weak plot forward. A group of scientists unearth a skeleton and a piece of machinery near Stonehenge. They accidentally trigger a countdown to the apocalypse, potentially dooming all of mankind. Collins plays Jacob, a misunderstood scientist trying to save everything. In truth he plays it in a very Castiel tongue in cheek way (just without the wings and grace). Torri Higginson plays Kaycee who delivers in an unoffensive manner, much like the rest of the cast, there aren't many moments when the acting is cheesy - it's more a case that they do their best without over or under acting. There were blatant plot holes and gaffes galore, the CGI was shockingly bad at times and it was obviously filmed in America rather than anywhere near England. It feels more like a low budget student film rather than your usual Sy-Fy trash, which actually surprised me. I watch a lot of rubbish films and I expected this to be one of those, but in truth it was slightly classier than some of the other rubbish I watch. It's got a little bit of action, a little pace, and enough of a plot and script to keep me entertained. For this reason I'm giving it a 5 out of 10 - not offensive rubbish that I'd avoid, but likewise not a noteworthy addition to the cinematographic world.

johannes2000-1 The most amazing thing happened: I sat this movie entirely out and in a weird way I found it (believe it or not!) to some minor degree actually entertaining. How come? Well, definitely not on account of the script, which was terrible. Maybe the premise was kind of original, but that seems easy when someone appears to have said: let's concoct the craziest, most unrealistic and most preposterous sci-fi-story ever! The script does its utmost (and succeeds brilliantly) in making the premise NOT work: not only the basic story-line, but all the goings-on are totally surreal and illogical. An (extra-terrestrial?) device lies dormant for billions of years in or under the Stonehenge-monument to suddenly get activated, not for reasons of its own, but because some crazy scientist has found an ancient artifact key. By applying this key on a newly discovered ancient pyramid in Maine, USA (?!?), it sets-off a series of supersonic beams or waves that connect ancient pyramids all over the world and blows them up and start the count-down for a total destruction of mankind. Why, what kind of aliens or ancient civilizations, when?? We never find out. Why the crazy scientist should want to precipitate the destruction of the earth stays in the dark, apart from some ramblings about "a new dawn for a new mankind". Oh really? on a totally annihilated planet?!? Some big shot from the government is brought in to deal with the matter and he disdainfully whisks away every explanation that the present scientists venture to give. Well, you can hardly blame him, the scientists in residence (two timid and wide-eyed ladies and one guy who in the end turns out to be a double-crossing wimp) are forever exchanging totally incomprehensible scientific mumbo-jumbo while obsessively watching silly wave-graphics on their monitors. Then the army is brought in and the commander in charge decides to nuke the place. Yeah, sure, that must be the safest thing to do: throw an atomic bomb on this totally unprecedented and unpredictable science- baffling device!! It's only through the efforts of our hero, a misunderstood scientist who for some unfathomable reason seems the one person who knows exactly what is going on, that the world is saved. With (equally unfathomable) deduction he knows that there is another artifact key that can stop the whole destruction. Huh?? This key conveniently lies exhibited in some archaeological museum in the US. The poor guy, who had just rushed from the US to Stonehenge, Great-Britain, now has to rush back to the States, to steal the key (surviving a gunfight in the process) and then back again to Great-Britain, all this with supersonic speed within the flick of a few hours time while the count-down ticks away the fate of the earth. With his dying breath he stops the destruction in the utter last second. Apart from what I described just now, nothing else remotely exciting happens. Of course everyone is very busy acting flabbergasted by the strange happenings at Stonehenge, and a count-down clock also gives some sense of urgency, but that's really about it. We don't see any aliens, the people that are killed by the radiation are puffed away to nothingness within a second and the global catastrophes are just hinted-at by way of radio and television news-flashes. The special effects (if I may call them thus) are appallingly simple and cheap-looking. The whole Stonehenge area is CGI and looks faker than fake, and when the colossal monoliths begin to move, plowing through the ground as fast as a sharp knife cuts through a pizza, it's so ludicrous that you really cannot believe anyone taking this seriously. The same with the visuals of the Yucatan-, Bali- and Gizeh-pyramids collapsing and exploding: as if they used postcard-images, put a match to it and filmed the result. So the question remains: why did I enjoy myself anyway? For one part it was the pretty fast pace of the movie, which sort of kept you on your toes. And there was this eerie part of me that was compelled to find out with what crazy ending they would come up. But my enjoyment was mainly due to the acting, which was surprisingly good. Misha Collins, who we all know so well as the imperturbable Castiel in the Supernatural series, plays the misunderstood scientist in a very Castiel kind of way, which is rather subdued and (subtly) tongue-in-cheek, and here this works like charm. Torri Higginson is okay, albeit rather unobtrusive, as the female scientist. But the biggest asset is Peter Wingfield. He has an impressive screen-presence and acts with natural ease and authority, and although he must have thought this whole project as way below (his) par, he delivers a very serious and convincing characterization, and it all the more makes you wonder why he (like Misha Collins) went along with this preposterous movie in the first place.

bluejohnno I can't believe some of the reviews on this.If you are watching this film for anything other than comedy value, what happens when you watch a really good film? Does your head explode?The accents were awful. The acting was worse. the science was shonky. The locations were abysmal. An earlier reviewer stated that they thought they paid attention to the little details. Really? Salisbury Plain in the middle of a forest with mountains in the background. Supposedly British army units in Hummers and some weird hybrid German/Jeep thing. Damn hilarious though!

Roddenhyzer Just to get this straight, I have absolutely nothing against Syfy Originals in general. Mostly, they're refreshingly irony-free throwbacks to classic drive-in b-movies and those giant monster flicks that Hollywood and independent studios alike tend to neglect. This one, however, was quite different, and not necessarily for the best.I guess my biggest issue, aside from the absolutely worthless protagonist, was the presentation of the story. An amazingly large part of the movie consists of very little more than a group of scientists *observing* the actual location of interest via monitors and meters. They analyze the data and discuss the mysterious threat that's supposed to be rising by the minute with as much melodrama as possible, but the fact remains that all we see is people *talking* about a dangerous situation from a safe distance. It hampers the sense of tension that's needed for a "Countdown to Doomsday" movie to work. It's not necessarily boring as much as it feels like a distraction from what *should* be the real focus, namely the actual sites of the strange phenomena. There are exceptions, of course; some of the later action scenes and special effects sequences really are pretty well executed for a TV movie, but they're only a minuscule portion of the whole.All in all, "Stonehenge Apocalypse" is one of the weaker Syfy Originals I've seen. It's undeniably much more coherent and serious than many of the others, but it thoroughly lacks true excitement and tension. The fact that most of its major plot devices are mere references to established real world pseudo-sciences, inelegantly thrown in there like quotes from their respective Wikipedia articles, certainly doesn't help.