Director/Visual Effects – Dylan Avery, Screenplay – Dylan Avery & Korey Rowe, Producers – Lori Bailey, Cuyle Carvin & Jeff Miller, Photography – Korey Rowe, Music – Johan Back Monell, Production Design – Kevin More & Natalie Wrubleski. Production Company – Louder Than Words/Otsego Media.
Cast
Cuyle Carvin (Spencer Coleman), Mattie Jo Cowsert (Lynn Coleman), Miley Rose (Zoe Coleman), Lejon Woods (Kenny), Richard Waddingham (Wilson), Elise Rovinsky (Mayor Mueller), Spencer Sherry (Chad), Maxwell Lehman (Milton), Angela Relucio (Agent Thomson), Bristol Pomeroy (Agent Thompson), Kyra Bradford (Phone Store Employee)
Plot
Spencer Coleman has bought a home in his childhood town of Oneonta, New York and moved back with his wife Lynn and teenage daughter Zoe. Zoe is horrified to find that the house has cellular service in only one area, while Spencer finds that installing the internet would cost thousands of dollars. NASA then announces that a meteorite is on a collision course with the Earth – and then that the location of the strike will be Oneonta. As there is mass panic around the town, Spencer makes the decision that they will not leave – only to then find that their house is ground zero for where the meteorite is going to strike.
Asteroid was the first fiction film from Dylan Avery. Avery was previously a documentarian whose most well-known work was the 9/11 Truther documentary Loose Change (2005), while he has made subsequent works in the same field. Avery has also made the documentaries Buzzkill: Is There Life After Coffee? (2010), Black and Blue (2017) about police brutality and Magic Molecule (2018) about CBD.
There is a whole body of Disaster Movies about asteroids, comets and meteors about to collide with the Earth. See the likes of A Fire in the Sky (1978), Meteor (1979), Asteroid (tv mini-series, 1997), Doomsday Rock (tv movie, 1997), Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998), Judgment Day (1999), Deadly Skies/Force of Impact (2006), Impact (tv mini-series, 2008), Meteor (tv mini-series, 2009), Meteor Apocalypse (2010), Meteor Storm (2010), Asteroid vs Earth (2014), Impact Earth (2015), Meteor Assault (2015), Asteroid-a-Geddon (2020), Greenland (2020), Meteor: First Impact (2022), Doomsday Meteor (2023). Indeed, Asteroid came out the same year as the high-profile Don’t Look Up (2021), which approached the whole oncoming asteroid plot as a biting satire.
Cuyle Carvin (c), daughter Miley Rose (l) and wife Mattie Jo Cowsert (r)
Unlike Don’t Look Up, Asteroid’s comedy plays out as a broad, mostly amiable strokes. There are easy jokes about daughter Miley Rose’s irritation at the lack of internet service at the house, about FBI agents tailing Cuyle Carvin, and Richard Waddingham as an aging conspiracy theorist who draws Carvin into his orbit. The humour is amiable but none of it is particularly challenging. I did find the scenes with Cuyle Carvin trying to sign up for internet services and the trip to the cellphone shop, which become a deadpan parody of bureaucratic entanglements, loopholes and ridiculous charges, amusing. And it was a droll touch to have the FBI agents named Thompson and Thomson, which surely seems a nod to the Tintin comics.
The film never dwells on any depiction of disaster – at most we get an end with everybody entering the shelter and then a wide-angle down on the town and a flash of light followed by a fade to black. Nor for that matter do we get any depictions of the usual lead-up to the disaster – at most, a very brief scene with the townspeople panicking as news of the target area is announced.
