TVSquad

Are you ready for some major disaster film effects? Were you disappointed that there wasn't more destruction when the Golden Gate Bridge broke in half on Eli Stone (I was.) Then you, like me, will be pleased to hear that David James Elliott is starring in a four-hour mini-series called Impact. Producers are promising lots of action and Charlton Heston-like epic disaster. Okay, maybe I added the Charlton Heston adjective, but at $13 million, the guys at Muse Entertainment, Jaffe/Braunstein Entertainment and Tandem Communications aren't skimping.

Casting David is a plus for starters. The former JAG star has a nice balance of serious and tongue-in-cheek, so hopefully he'll keep Impact from getting too cheesey. The story, however, does have Velveeta potential.

The plot erupts when a meteor shower results in a piece of a dwarf star (no, I was going to make a joke about Michael Dunn, but I'll refrain) breaks off and collides into the moon. The impact (get the title now?) causes the moon to shift out of orbit which leads to all kinds of problems here on earth.

Big problems, too. Cell phone interruptions. Cable and satellite interference. No, no, those are the minor inconveniences. The really big ones are the tides not rolling in on schedule and -- I love this one -- sporadic weightlessness! I want to try that one.

In Michael Vickerman's screenplay, David's character is Alex Kinter, an astrophysicist. He teams with a female astrophysicist (uncast so far), and together they find out that the moon is so out of whack that it's going to collide with the earth. How do they solve the problem? Well, we'll just have to tune in to find out.