n the blue-collar spacefaring future, Goad (San Giacomo) is a brilliant computer programmer with a reputation for flakiness and a fixation on the works of William Shakespeare. She is so nuts that when she emerges from cryogenic suspension with a valuable and volatile cargo, she blows up the rendezvous ship and prances around her own vessel's control room while reciting the Bard's greatest hits.
Capt. Wayne (Sandra Bernhard), commander of a spacefaring salvage operation, is a tough-talking, abrasive brawler so intent on wreaking havoc wherever she goes that she seizes any halfway reasonable opportunity to start bar fights. She is not rendered any more pleasant by the mission that requires her to hire her sinister ex-lover, Vendler (Zagarino), and his band of aggressively villainous ne'er-do-wells to help her usual crew salvage the valuable cargo of Goad's derelict ship. She doesn't know that the newcomers intend to murder her regulars and claim the booty for themselves.
Neither the heroes nor the villains know that Goad, now a mocking presence inside the derelict ship's computer system, has reprogrammed the navigation ship to crash-land into Earth ... an impact that will wipe out all life on the mother planet.
Slings and arrows of outrageously bad acting
There's a special kind of sick fascination that comes from watching performers with decent resumes flailing about in crap. It's the main attraction of The Apocalypse, which tries very hard to be exciting but fails to engage on any level.
Laura San Giacomo, at what may have been the nadir of her career, plays the nutty programmer Goad, who speaks entirely in Shakespearean soliloquies. She might have been attracted to the role by the opportunity to recite a whole lot of Hamlet and Julius Caesar, but she plays them all with an appropriate nuttiness that provides no indication, positive or negative, of her actual talent for interpreting the works of the Bard. The isolated nature of her character saves her from any real interaction with the rest of her cast. Still, it's undeniable that she has the best-written lines.
A bigger problem is comedienne Sandra Bernhard as the tough-talking, feisty Capt. Wayne. Bernhard is an actress of limited but nevertheless impressive credentials; her performance as an obsessed celebrity-stalker in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy earned kudos for her undeniable screen presence and impressive comic timing. The role could have led to more work in edgy comedies, but though she acted many times again, no truly memorable film career ever jelled, and her performance in this throwaway film, in which she's intended to be a tough action heroine, emerges as just sad. It doesn't help that her character is a despicable pill, but even with that taken into account, she still fails on all levels. Her acting here is so wooden that she can't even persuade with lines as simple as "Oh shit!", and the scenes where she has to show physical prowess are even worse.
When she fights a thug in the spaceport bar, throwing punches that don't convey any illusion of physical strength, she's just laughable—and later, when she confronts Vendler in single combat, she's sluggish and clumsy and impossible to believe as a formidable scrapper. Much of this can be attributed to poor fight choreography, which is a problem throughout; it's easy to spot characters who fling themselves backward a split second before the eruption of explosive fireballs. But the bad blocking doesn't seem to hamper any of the other performers in the film anywhere near as visibly as it happens to her. She's just plain bad at it.
The biggest problem, of course, is the unimaginative storyline. The nutty lady programs her spaceship to crash into Earth because she's nutty; the bad guy has no interest in fixing the problem because he's a bad guy; the tough heroine's interest in trashing the bad guy seems to have less to do with saving Earth's billions than it does with the fact that she used to date the creep. As for any pretense of intelligent science-fictional content, we should note the classic line of dialogue in which the embattled bartender hero hopes to make the spaceship miss Earth and, quote, "crash into a star or something." Granted that scientific illiteracy of this kind is consistent with his character, the joke does not seem all that deliberate in context.
