“The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Justin’s rating: Back when the news was in standard definition

Justin’s review: At Halloween 1994, CBS decided to pull a bit of a War of the Worlds-style broadcast with a now-obscure movie called Without Warning. Instead of being your typical disaster flick, this two-hour event was styled as a series of special news bulletins breaking into normal programming, covering what turns out to be massive asteroid impacts — three of them, across the northern hemisphere.

Both real newscasters and actors posing as journalists (in particular, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s John de Lancie, half of Law & Order’s cast, and Malcolm in the Middle’s Jane Kaczmarek) cover the unfolding scenario… which ends up being far more than a natural disaster. In fact, this is the prelude to a full-on alien attack during which the entire world has to scramble to deflect.

For a low-budget project, this is a saavvy way to cover an apocalyptic global attack. We don’t pan out to see the whole globe being pelted by expensive CGI shots; we get frantic reporters on the ground trying to make sense of their limited viewpoint.

Not only was this more economical, it feels way more authentic… which is exactly what the creators were hoping to produce. After all, if this all did happen, we’d be learning about it on the news and social media instead of a high omnipresent vantage point.

And all of the people in Without Warning play this extremely straight. Nobody’s angling to be the quippy hero or shoehorning in a romance; this is a bunch of news people thrust into the most extraordinary work day of their life. Again, genius.

Even knowing that this is a fakery, it’s hard not to feel actual anxiety when a pretend TV movie is abruptly interrupted with grim-faced journalists talking about devastating asteroids. It gave me flashbacks to the unfolding events of 9/11 as we sat glued to the news channels.

Without Warning feels so authentic, in fact, that CBS kept flashing a disclaimer across the bottom of the screen to avoid setting off an actual real-life panic (some did, however, and worried phone calls quickly followed). There’s even a strong if unconfirmed rumor that Steven Spielberg was so impressed with the broadcast that it led to him moving ahead with Deep Impact.

It’s kind of a trip to revisit the style of news that they had in the mid-90s with the less sensationalist approach and early computer graphics. And as the situation gradually reveals itself to be an alien attack, the limitations of what they can show become apparent.

It is a little odd that we don’t get any “news bulletins” from the President or anyone higher up in the government than NASA officials and the White House Press Secretary, but you’d have to imagine that this would be impossible to procure for real — and if they hauled out an actor pretending to be the President, it would pop the immersion that the filmmakers were trying to establish.

While the “feel” of Without Warning — a kind of proto-found footage movie — is incredibly engrossing (even factoring in some filler “interviews”), the actual science and alien angle are kind of silly when given any serious examination. There’s so much speculation and flimsy explanations given that what’s actually happening could be pretty much anything in the end.

No, this isn’t something you’d watch if you expect clear answers from your movies, but the full experience is something worthwhile even so.