Director/Screenplay – Monroe Robertson, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Mark David, Music – Mikel Shane Prather & Phillip Ramirez, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Production Design – Sydney Allen. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Erica Duke (Dr. Milly Anderson), Doug Jeffrey (Dresden Anderson), Phillip Botello (Peter Houston), Erin Gall (Sophie Anderson), Michael Paré (General West), Anthony Jensen (Major Joshua Anderson), Brittani O’Connell (Jiah), Chevonne Wilson (Dr. Diane Wright), Zack ‘Slim’ Simonini (Foreman Davis), Angelo Kern (Corporal Richards), Brad Staggs (Captain Vogel), Marlee Carpenter (PJ)
Plot
Efforts to retrieve nuclear weaponry that has fallen into the Mariana Trench go wrong, detonating one of the bombs. At the National Earthquake Information Center in Seattle, director Milly Anderson receives reports of a vast ring of earthquakes that have been triggered around the world. Milly’s teenage daughter Sophie is caught in one of these when the plane she is aboard is forced to make an emergency landing. General West calls from The White House wanting the help of Milly’s brother Dresden, a brilliant scientist who worked on the Star Wars defence program. Dresden appears and learns of a radical plan to activate the satellite weaponry and use it to quell the earthquakes. Through the devastation, they attempt to put the plan into action.
The Asylum is a low-budget production company that has been active since the early 2000s where they have put out a prolific output of films, ranging from their Mockbusters – films made with titles that resemble high-profile theatrical releases – along with a body of disaster and monster movies, in particular killer shark films with their ongoing Mega Shark and Multi-Headed Shark series and the B-movie hit of Sharknado (2013) and sequels.
The low-budget Disaster Movie has become the province of the Syfy and other cable channels throughout the 2000s and beyond. The Asylum have made a good number of these low-budget disaster movies with the likes of The Apocalypse (2007), 2012: Doomsday (2007), 2012 Supernova (2009), Titanic II (2009), 2012: Ice Age (2011), 100° Below 0 (2013), 500 MPH Storm (2013), Age of Ice (2014), Airplane vs Volcano (2013), Asteroid vs Earth (2014), San Andreas Quake (2015), Geo-Disaster (2017), Oceans Rising (2017), End of the World (2018), Apocalypse of Ice (2020), Asteroid-a-Geddon (2020), Collision Earth (2020), Meteor Moon (2020), 4 Horsemen: Apocalypse (2022), Moon Crash (2022), Titanic 666 (2022), 20.0 Megaquake (2022), Arctic Armageddon (2023) and Earthquake Underground (2024).
(l to r) Phillip Botello, Erica Duke and Doug Jeffrey face a planetquake
Planetquake follows the formula of this type of film. There is an exotic planet-threatening form of disaster; a radical solution to save the day devised by a scientist who has been discredited/lives on the fringe. In between, there is all the usual scenes with the characters and family members caught up in the midst of the disaster. It all comes together passably well as this type of film goes. The technobabble even has a quasi-conviction to it. There is the occasional cute line – Erica Duke describes her brother “Imagine if Einstein was trapped in the paranoia of Ted Kaczynski with the ego of Elon Musk.”
These days The Asylum’s in-house visual effects team have improved to the point they are turning out effects that rival some A-list studio films. There are some impressive scenes of major devastation caused by the quakes around the world. What I was quite impressed with was the scenes where the various characters are travelling through the devastation or looking out at the likes of collapsed parking buildings, which gives the impression that the film was actually shot in a real disaster location or visual effects used to seamlessly insert the characters into such footage.
Planetquake was a directorial debut for British-born Monroe Robertson who has some previous credits as an actor and has worked as an editor.
