Let me get this part over with: What a stupid movie.
This movie is a collision between the theatre of the accurate and the theatre of the absurd - and accuracy loses out in the process. Much of this movie was filmed in actual NASA locations and manages to get a pretty accurate technical "look" to it. This is all overwhelmed by the extreme vapidity of the film's "plot" which is Saturday morning super hero show mixed with recycled plot elements from "The Dirty Dozen" and that John Wayne movie where he ran around the world putting out oil well fires. Add Bruce Willis and it's actually "Die Hard in Space".
When it is time to show the human aspect of a potential world-shattering impact the movie immediately jumps into a look and feel that is straight out of those American Express or multinational corporation TV ads you see on Sunday morning talk shows.
As for the technical accuracy of the movie: there ain't none - except for one glaring exception: the current condition and operational procedures used on Mir are portrayed with painstaking accuracy. Former astronaut Joe Allen is listed as a technical advisor for the film. I wonder if anyone connected with the film ever talked to him - I guess there must have been some interaction since he plays a bit part in Mission Control.
I am still amazed that NASA chose to aid this idiotic movie to the great extent they did (at what expense?) while a vastly more accurate film on the same topic such as Deep Impact was more or less officially ignored by NASA.
Now for the important stuff: this movie has more NASA meatball logos than there are asteroids in this solar system. NASA PAO (Prevent Administrator Outrage) obviously made certain that Dan would find nothing to grumble about.
Well, almost.
Without giving anything away, the opening sequence features an astronaut doing an EVA in a perfectly reproduced Shuttle EVA suit - complete with several NASA Worm logos! Alas, in the next few moments that worm is banished from this universe most efficiently.
Of course everything has names that resonate with Dan Goldin's new NASA.
Well, almost.
Eventually Bruce and the boys hop into their spaceships - not just any spaceships mind you but super duper USAF X-71's hidden in plain sight inside the VAB. Of course, these shuttles have inspring, historically resonate names. One of them is named "Freedom". It was kinda nice to hear CAPCOM calling "Freedom".
Oh yes, a single gantry now services both pads 39A and 39B; asteroid bits only hit major cities, and NASA's "Executive Director" works at JSC (we already knew this, right?)
My advice? see it - but leave your IQ at home. With all of the NASA location shooting, you're certain to see someone - or someplace you know. There are some rather funny one liners - indeed, the script is actually a marathon series of one liners strung together.
My wife summed it up best: "this movie kept my attention because things kept moving and blowing up".
" Without the NBS, the movie crew pulled out of it's committment to MSFC. It was not surprising to hear soon after that the movie was to be shot at JSC. Apparently the NBL's training schedule was not as totally booked as they originally advertised - which test runs were deleted or slipped to accommodate the filming schedule? How can movie stars be qualified to get into space suits when scientists and engineers aren't afforded access to the JSC facility? Maybe it's because the movie star's egos are almost as big as the astronaut's."
Editor's note: Well, the movie's stars didn't get everything they wanted - rumor has it that Bruce Willis was a little annoyed to discover that he was not going to get to take a KC-135 flight.
Another inaccurate movie: Everyone at NASA knows that the recovered alien bodies are stored in that LeRC hangar right next to the airport.
Comments from several_folks@lerc.nasa.gov:
"Here I thought only old NASA Worms were buried there. Thanks for the info! Now, "everybody" knows."Editor's note: We stand corrected with regard to the location of the alien corpses."Everyone here at LeRC knows that we keep the alien corpses underneath the mound adjacent to Bldg 49 at the south end of the main lab. The hangar is at the north end."