Watch CAT. 8 For Free

That was an excellent one.

How sad is this?

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I actually took the time to watch yet another disaster flick on the Spanish language channel UniMás. While I did do some live-tweeting which contains a few "MST3K"-inspired quips, the re-viewing experience was torturous, especially when I learned this was a three-hour show. This TV movie followed the blueprint for your typical average disaster flick. But while the plot was nothing new & detestable, the characters were even worse, particularly w/ that one guy, um, Secretary of Defense or something, acting as evil as a villain in a Jean-Claude Van Damme film (also aired often on UniMás), & that's quite too evil when it comes to a "disasterpiece." Maxim Roy as Dr. Jane spends the first half looking like she's got indigestion from eating at Wienerschnitzel. & after she's escaped the devious Beltway, she becomes an acceptable love interest for Matthew Modine. I'm sure that the climax of the film, which was when Modine & Co. fought off certain apocalypse, actually took place in the middle, because afterwards, "CAT.8" transforms into a conspiracy thriller, w/ some occasional CGI disasters, such as the never-realistic & cartoonish instant canyon. & I knew the science of this movie was noticeably screwy when the government could shoot a laser at the sun, reach it in a manner of picoseconds, & solar flares could actually pose a genocidal threat. If I must say something positive, at least the SFX looked, um somewhat professional. But in conclusion, "CAT.8" is just a big, prolonged hot mess in many ways.

Its a shame someone like Mathew Modine was suckered into this. He is good as usual at keeping a solid character portrayal but thats where it all ends. After that this is probably one of the hardest things I have ever made myself watch. A real lousy implementation of VFX. The fact that his partner did not complain to someone is totally unreal. Let us not forget of course the complete misrepresentation of scientific fact. Finally what happened to the payback against secretary of defense and his sidekick. The ending is a complete let down. Who ever funded this must be regretting it now! Don't waist your time unless you wan to see how not to make a sci-fi. This is more like a bad drama.

IMO sci-fi has two parts...'science' and 'fiction'…this series misses both, Lets start with the 'fiction' part slash plot ….government hi-tech experiment goes bad…sun is going ham on planet earth…human hero 'bad-boy-knows-it-all' saves earth from the sun…then he knows how to restart the core…then he restarts the core with a machine that he kept in his barn … and finally he gets the girl!My personal metric is which of this ''original story'' couldn't have been written by a 10 year old...verdict: not much … have to give credit though for the 'really fictional' parts i could spot.. the fact that he did all this while getting chased by the US military – and the part that he could operate a multimillion-high-tech-sun-magnetosphere-disruption- facility with just his daughter and her boyfriend … ah and the president dies of falling debris because he was giving a speech under a half collapsed building <- this was a good one About the 'science' part -Not there- And no ..you don't have to be or pretend to be a scientist to figure out that downtown Chicago, Big Ben and Athens is ridiculously unlikely to be destroyed by satellite debris. Or if you turn a blind eye on the solar- flare-induced-6.5-earthquake, how can you not wonder why the heck the epicenter was somewhere in East Coast US? I watch sci-fi and enjoy it because it could show a glimpse of what might happen after 50-100-10000000 with a lots of sauce of course, but with some respect to some scientific hard facts .. this film was about what could never happen in a trillion years in the most remote parallel universe.Acting was alright I guess ...

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