Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		2.0
Audio		1.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		1.0

Countdown: Armageddon Blu-ray Movie Review

Guaranteed writer's and movie watcher's burnout in 90 minutes.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman April 18, 2015

Who knew the end of the world could be so...boring? Director A.F. Silver's film is a snooze-fest of tedium that explores, um, some kind of end of the world cataclysm that's a backdrop for the tale of a woman in search of her missing daughter. The picture plays out almost as if in slow motion. Every scene feels like it takes ages to go anywhere, like the movie is stretching every which way it can to squeeze out enough minutes to reach 90. It's so slow that every little plot advancement gets lost in the shuffle of its structural haphazardness, inability to adequately shape a narrative or even tell a core story. It's "daughter is missing, mother panics" and everything else is like background noise, and no matter how deep the lead characters gets, it all feels superfluously tedious and unimportant. A movie like this is a reviewer's worst nightmare. It's like trying to write about paint drying or the grass growing without falling asleep at the keybo..............................ard. Sorry. Won't happen again. The Red Bull promises.

She'll do anything to keep this movie off her résumé.

Television reporter Allison (Kim Little) is covering a groundbreaking peace accord that promises stability in the Middle East. During a live shot, an earthquake strikes Los Angeles. Another hits Tokyo. The world is falling apart at the seams. Her ex-husband Mark (Mark Hengst), who works for the CIA, says he's heading to Atlanta for work on a two-week trip. Allison's daughter Mary (Audrey Latt) wants to accompany him. Allison doesn't want her to go. Suddenly, Mary and Mark disappear. The police are of no help, and Allison is left on her own to learn what happened. With the help of her friend Cindy (April Wade), Allison learns from secret digital files that Mark has traveled to Israel. She hops a plane and heads for the Holy Land in search of her daughter. What she'll find will change her life forever.

Countdown: Armageddon desperately wants to be the little engine that could, a movie that strings together a complex narrative of Biblical prophecy, end-times disaster, worldwide turmoil, personal revelation, and salvation, all on a small studio schedule, budget, and lower tier actors. But it fails. Miserably. Kudos for making the effort, but Countdown: Armageddon simply isn't made with enough technical savvy, visual pizzaz, quality acting, or other necessary components to yield a workable movie. And it's not simply the fault of a small budget. Many films have overcome tiny funds to become good, great, or even something special. Not here. Whether in its basic set-up; would-be deepest, most thought-provoking bits; action scenes; or dramatic turns; the film never plays with any real, tangible sense of urgency or even sense of self. It's like a random collection of images all (very loosely) tied together by a story of a mother in search of her missing daughter. She winds up in the middle of something far bigger than she can imagine, but the film never opens up or gives the audience a reason to care about any of it. It almost had to have worked this hard to be this dull, this uninspired, and fall so completely far from the mark that it's impossible to tell where that mark is, what it looks like, or what might happen if it even approached the mark, let alone hit the target on the periphery or, heaven forbid, the bullseye.

The film is also home to a number of general shortcomings. It features the usual suspect bad visual effects, like fire that looks plopped on top of whatever's meant to be burning and earthquakes that reveal large, artificial cracks in roadways that would look out of place in a decade old video game. The picture suffers from poor acting, particularly from secondaries but even Kim Little often looks just as confused as the audience, unsure what's happening or why and doing little more than running through scenes to get them done. It's not all on her, though; the part is so haphazardly and aimlessly written that it leaves her with nothing to do but just push forward and hope for the best, and when the editing is so poor that scenes seem randomly inserted at will, at times, it doesn't help to create a more cohesive character-builing flow. At one point, Allison is searching through some digital files with the help of her friend. The film cuts to a scene of her back at the bathroom where little Mary went missing. A storm comes and digital wind and hail force her to hide inside. It then cuts back to more data mining between her and her friend. If that's not an editing oops, then the film gets an "F" for making sure the audience knows what's going on, and that comes even before the true boredom sets in, which is when she arrives in Israel. But no matter what's happening, the movie never feels alive or genuine. It's sparsely populated to the point that the empty seats on a plane seem to outnumber the filled ones by a margin of 3 or 4 to 1, at least in the cramped confines of the scene. Even traffic unconnected with the production casually drives through the background, giving the movie a further sense of jarring detachment. It's a real mess, and this review only touches the surface of the problems.

Countdown: Armageddon Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Countdown: Armageddon features a dull but workable 1080p transfer framed at 1.78:1. Details are rarely exciting or exacting. Skin and clothing textures fail to find aggressive, nuanced specifics. Faces are particularly flat, but basic surfaces like stucco walls and desert terrain look healthily complex and clear. Colors are largely flat and uninspired outside of daylight scenes, but natural greens and Allison's blue shirt are capably robust. Skin tones push warm and blacks pale. Noise, aliasing, and light blocking are evident. Watch for a building to sway in and out under the influence of poor digital workmanship in one early scene.

Countdown: Armageddon Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Countdown: Armageddon features a lazy Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. There's little organic life to music; it's cramped and lacks vitality, heft, or more than cursory clarity. Earthquakes, wind, and other heavy effects fall flat with a noticeable lack of distinction, placement, or realism. They're basically defined but go no further. Dialogue is adequately clear and well defined but a touch sharp and shallow in spots.

Countdown: Armageddon Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Countdown: Armageddon contains no supplements. No "top menu" is included; chapter selections may be accessed in-film via the "pop-up" menu. Movie playback begins immediately upon disc insertion.

Countdown: Armageddon Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Countdown: Armageddon is even boring to write about. It's an empty, aimless film that fails to shape any kind of message, tell any kind of dramatically satisfying or intense story, or support it with any meaningful action or special effects. It's low-budget rubbish with bigger aspirations that it cannot touch for every reason: a bad script, a dull story, poor acting, lame visual effects, iffy editing, and so on. One word to sum it up? How about a guttural "ugh." Echo Bridge's featureless Blu-ray offers passable video and dull audio. Skip it unless slow torture sounds for whatever reason fun.