Made-for-TV movies hold a dear place in my heart, for some reason I totally fail to grasp. There's just something I love about the inherent "B" quality that always seems to crop up in them. Not everybody sees it this way.
I gather from reading the other comments here that many of you tuned in hoping to see a movie. This is a common misconception about TV movies. You aren't really watching a movie, you're watching a two hour long episode in a TV series you will never see the rest of.
Actually, the last TV movie I saw about a pandemic disease was the multi-part adaptation of Stephen King's "The Stand," which came out embarrassingly well done. There was none of that here, but what, really, were you expecting? I have no idea how accurate the disease information in this movie is; I don't really care. The fact is that I've seen a fair amount of TV movies by ABC and CBS (none from NBC, though I hear there's one out this week) and I'd have to say that ABC makes a consistently better movie than CBS does.
CBS likes to make disaster movies. I saw BOTH "Category 6" and "Category 7" on CBS, and I'm glad to say that "Fatal Contact," though cheesy, is "Citizen Kane" compared to either of these. The characters here are fairly believable, the special effects were not overplayed (TV movies always have terrible special effects, and even their regular effects aren't that hot), and I even liked the ending. I felt it was satisfactory.
All told, TV movies are never that good. The case for most of them is that if they turned up in theaters, you would walk out and demand your money back. But with direct-to-TV productions everything's a little bit more freewheeling. Relax, and immerse yourselves in the the heavy-handed plots and shallow budgets of network feature films...
I gather from reading the other comments here that many of you tuned in hoping to see a movie. This is a common misconception about TV movies. You aren't really watching a movie, you're watching a two hour long episode in a TV series you will never see the rest of.
Actually, the last TV movie I saw about a pandemic disease was the multi-part adaptation of Stephen King's "The Stand," which came out embarrassingly well done. There was none of that here, but what, really, were you expecting? I have no idea how accurate the disease information in this movie is; I don't really care. The fact is that I've seen a fair amount of TV movies by ABC and CBS (none from NBC, though I hear there's one out this week) and I'd have to say that ABC makes a consistently better movie than CBS does.
CBS likes to make disaster movies. I saw BOTH "Category 6" and "Category 7" on CBS, and I'm glad to say that "Fatal Contact," though cheesy, is "Citizen Kane" compared to either of these. The characters here are fairly believable, the special effects were not overplayed (TV movies always have terrible special effects, and even their regular effects aren't that hot), and I even liked the ending. I felt it was satisfactory.
All told, TV movies are never that good. The case for most of them is that if they turned up in theaters, you would walk out and demand your money back. But with direct-to-TV productions everything's a little bit more freewheeling. Relax, and immerse yourselves in the the heavy-handed plots and shallow budgets of network feature films...