Meteor (2009) TV movie

I didn't realize at first that the 2009 TV movie Meteor broadcast in two parts on July 12 and 19 was a remake of the 1979 feature film of the same title. The premise is the same for both: a comet hits an asteroid and changes its orbit. What are the odds that the asteroid will head straight to Earth? In Hollywood, it's always 1 to 1 odds where asteroids and meteors and their chances of striking Earth and obliterating the planet or human civilization are concerned.

Christopher Lloyd, who plays an astronomer with a "cry wolf" reputation for a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) official played by Jason Alexander, was billed as one of the stars. Lloyd's character, who seemed to be a remix of his Back to the Future one, was killed off fairly early in part one. His female protege goes through a series of unbelievable adventures, including stumbling into a Mexican police station that's been taken over by either on-site prisoners or escaped inmates from a prison. She manages to escape, all the while clutching her laptop computer with its precious calculations on the trajectory of an asteroid named Kassandra heading to Earth. A number of sub-plots are played out, all of which are rather contrived and some of the main characters in these different sub-plots converge at the end of part 2.

Of course the Earth is saved from a horrible fate when the young female astronomer manages to convince the U.S. military to reprogram their nuclear missiles and those of the Russians and Chinese while in flight and minutes before they're set to impact the asteroid so that the missiles will detonate before impact and with their blast cushion deflect the asteroid away from the Earth and also not let nuclear radiation poison the atmosphere. Whew, I'm glad we were able to stop that from happening. The TV movie ends rather gloomily, however, when in the concluding scene the female astronomer tells the male lead character of another asteroid headed our way in a few years time for yet another close call.