The movie opens up with the whole world getting ready to watch the biggest meteor shower in recorded history, but the biggest show comes when a remnant of a brown dwarf (a massively dense and apparently magnetic object) ends up impacting into the Moon and embeds itself, causing not only a massive scar on the surface of the Moon, but also a shift in its orbit.
Tasked with figuring out how to deal with the changes here on Earth, the least of which are bands of gravity that tend to pull people to the sky (yes... the phrase "You can't hide from gravity" is said a couple of times in the film), are our main characters who all used to work together at NASA, but have since gone their separate ways. Heading up the team is Dr. Maddie Rhodes (Natasha Henstridge), and when asked to form her team, she chooses Alex Kittner (David James Elliott) and Roland Emerson (Benjamin Sadler).
As the trio work from around the world trying to figure out what exactly is causing the many strange gravitational and electrical anomalies, we are treated to several bits of disaster as streets of cars are lifted off the ground, trains get derailed and oil tankers are pulled out of the ocean. We also get a bit of info about each of these three doctors' home lives.
Maddie is divorced and her news-hound ex-husband is looking to use his connection with her as a way to get his job back at the paper, while Roland is engaged and just found out he is going to be a father, but the main familial focus in the movie is Alex, his kids and their grandfather. Alex is a widower (the grandfather (James Cromwell) is his late-wife's dad), and he hasn't been one all too long. Alex's first issue is having to leave his kids for the first time since their mother's death, but he leaves them in the care of Lloyd (the grandfather), who claims to have a social phobia that, while he can leave his house, he prefers not to leave the area he can see from his front yard. This naturally becomes an issue when Lloyd needs to get the kids to Washington D.C. to see their Dad. Ultimately, these side plots feel a bit unnecessary and only really pay off when the scientists have a heart-to-heart moment as they are sent off to the Moon itself (you know it had to happen) to implement a plan that could prove one-way.
Special features are a bit light. The only one I found slightly interesting focused on the train scene where the production and CG teams have to lift a train from its rails, and the people inside have to be bumped around quite a bit. The other features are a few deleted scenes and your run-of-the-mill Making Of featurette.
Despite seeming to be inspired by the opening sequence of Thundarr the Barbarian, and having a bit of pseudo-science corniness thrown in, this mini-series wasn't all that bad. It had a tendency to feel a bit drawn out (almost like it could have been condensed into a made-for-TV movie), but it's worth watching if you are into disaster movies.
