Megafault

I saw a commercial for this movie a few weeks ago and decided to see it after seeing the word “mega” in its title. Little did I know that it had more than one established actor, well above the average for a Syfy Original Movie. The movie stars the recently departed Brittany Murphy, of Clueless fame, Eriq LaSalle from “ER” (back when it was a good show), and Bruce Davison, better known as Senator Kelly from the X-Men movies. And as a bonus, Paul Logan, AKA Jason from Mega Piranha! (Syfy movies frequently cross-pollinate, but this was kind of ridiculous. Still, seeing Jason again was one of the few bright spots for me during Megafault.)

Despite the above-average cast, Megafault ranks among the stupidest Syfy movies I’ve ever seen. I hesitate to declare it THE stupidest of them all, because the field is really competitive, but it comes darn close. Without further ado, let’s take a closer look at the movie.

Plot Summary

A hitherto unknown “deep fault” opens up in West Virginia, and travels westward through the country. Can Dr. Amy Lane (Brittany Murphy) and demo man Boomer (Eriq LaSalle) find a way to stop Megafault from destroying the country? (BTW, the characters actually call the earthquake “Megafault” during the movie—it’s not just the movie title!)

Nutrition Facts

Vitamin B-Acting: 80%

The rating would have been higher had anybody shown an ounce of life and put some ham into their acting. Frankly, the sheer lack of emotion is quite amazing—most of the time characters react to events like zombies. Megafault definitely comes across as a “we needed the money to pay our bills” sort of movie.

Vitamin B-SFX: 90%

Oh, this is a gold mine of bad SFX. Here were my favorite moments:

1) The plumes of black smoke over Washington, DC. Notice how they’re not moving at all? Normally smoke blows with the wind. These smoke plumes just hang in the air as if they’d been sprayed with 10 pounds of Aquanet. On a similar note, one smoke plume that actually moves was clearly put on a motion cycle—if you watch carefully, the smoke moves for one cycle, then repeats the exact same motions over and over again.

2) The giant cracks in the earth are clearly fake. At one point, when watching the fault make its way to Louisville, KY, it looked like someone had used the Smudge function on Adobe Photoshop to make the fault. You could see the smudging as the fault moved!

3) Laser-guided fault lines. The fault lines would ALWAYS pursue characters. Earthquakes are vindictive creatures, y’know. 

4) Small towns in Wyoming melting away and people randomly bursting into flames when the Yellowstone volcano gets reactivated. Now this is a classic Syfy SFX moment!

Then of course there’s the charming last shot, which is an aerial shot of the US with a huge gash from West Virginia to Arizona.

Vitamin Fun: 30%

Despite the high ratings I’ve given so far, this is a surprisingly dull movie. It’s the sort of movie in which every scene gets stretched out for a few too many seconds. We spend far more time watching Amy Lane mope and not doing her job than watching Megafault destruction. You’re likely to find yourself checking your watch to see when the movie will end.

Sugar: 10%

Amy Lane wants to be with her family. Like, really really wants to see her little girl and her husband. But she can’t, because, like, she has to stop some dumb humongous earthquake from killing a zillion people. Finally Boomer comes up with a way to stop it, and she reunites with her girl and husband. Only problem is, by then I was itching to give Amy a good slap for being completely self-absorbed and indifferent to the larger catastrophe.

Plot Fiber: 0%

Most of the problems with logic will show up in the “Pseudoscience Pill” section in this review, but there are a few non-science things that go here…all concerning Dr. Amy Lane. (Can you tell yet how much I loathed this character?)

Here are some of the things Amy Lane does:

1) She repeatedly goes off to complain to Boomer about not being with her family, or mope about not being with her family, rather than staying at emergency headquarters to fix a national catastrophe. Amy, your daughter is with your husband, it’s not like she’s wandering around on her own. Meanwhile, millions of people are dying, and you’re apparently the top expert on tectonics. Get your priorities straight, Amy. 

2) It’s ultimately Boomer who comes up with the solution that stops the Megafault, not the tectonics expert (she had to go mope some more). 

The 47th moping scene in the movie

3) Amy has Jason (okay, his Megafault character is named “Boyd,” but to me he will always be Jason) fly a helicopter straight to Louisville…to help FEMA set up? To give local officials warning of the fault headed their way? No. It’s so they can try to rescue Boomer’s mother.

4) Another helicopter incident—this movie has a thing for helis—after the Louisville scenes, Amy and Boomer steal Boyd’s helicopter and are chased by fighter planes. (I should add that Amy got Boomer to steal the plane so she could go look for hubby and daughter, not so she could do something to stop the earthquake.) Boomer and Amy don’t take the fighters seriously and think they can just SHRUG THEM OFF. Similarly, once Amy and Boomer are taken to a military base under escort for stealing a helicopter, Amy proceeds to order around the base commander. What military person would tolerate this doo-doo in real life???

I’ve gone on long enough—time to move on to pseudoscience.

Supplements

Pseudoscience Pill

Oh, boy. Talk about a pseudoscience landmine.

Simply put: tectonic plates just don’t work the way they do in this movie. If they did, Earth would have fallen apart by now.

Real tectonic plate movements involve a great deal of pushing and pulling. You’re not going to have two plates start flying away from each other, as in the movie, without catastrophic effects everywhere else. I’d bet that even North American cities far away from the so-called giant fissure, like Seattle and Miami, would suffer bad earthquakes.

Speaking of giant fissures, the fissures in the movie were unrealistic, and that is being very generous. The fissures in Megafault seem to follow a universal movie law that requires fissures to chase the heroes with laser-like accuracy. More importantly, however, real-life earthquakes don’t come close to creating such large fissures. For more examples of how movies regularly take liberties with earthquakes, check out this page.

Fissure: "Ah...I smell the heroine's hubby and little girl in that truck. MUST. GET. THEM."

The groundwater-freezing satellite scheme was nuts. How the heck can you FREEZE an earthquake into stopping? If plates are going to move, they will move and ain’t nothing stopping them.

Then there’s the Yellowstone volcano. Or caldera, I should say. Once Boomer and Amy get caught up in their plan to blow up mines and create an earthquake block (!!!), the caldera is forgotten entirely. If this caldera is capable of blowing up the entire world, uh, shouldn’t people be paying more attention to that fact after the earthquake threat is dealt with? Anybody who has read Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa will appreciate what kind of threat a cataclysmic eruption poses to human life.

Likelihood of choking: 100% 

"I'm just a li'l caldera. Ignore the lava, it won't hurt you. La la laa..."

Political Pill

Amy throws out a few flimsy lines about how ill-prepared cities are for earthquakes, but these lines have about as much impact as one drop of rain falling into the ocean. 

Likelihood of choking: 0.5%

"X-Men made more sense, and it was a comic book movie!"