If I had known that SyFy Films, the same studio that produced 400 Days, produced Atomica, I would not have put it in my queue, but I didn’t so I did, and I’ll never get that time back. The other bad sign was that they didn’t spring for closed captioning. 400 Days was way better than Atomica. Dreckitude!
Atomica’s premise isn’t awful. We have the most awesome nuclear power plants that recycle radiation fallout and clean the atmosphere, but lost communications with one of them. Abby, a true believer, played by Sarah Habel, in the company decides to check things out and realizes that reality is very different and more dangerous than the trainings led her to believe. She has to decide who to trust: Lost’s Dominic Monaghan or Strange Days’ Tom Sizemore. FML. How about neither? From jump, the real premise seemed to be HOW they would screw her over, not which one. WHY when you know that you lost communications would you NOT set up a pickup time with the pilot even if he were a jerk just as a safety measure? Abby was a dumbass from jump, and Habel is not a good enough actor to carry the entire movie or even a good TV series at this point, especially with those two as costars. Is Monaghan required to play the guitar and be a former drug addict in everything now? Sizemore is a scientist. Sure, OK.
I was not invested in Atomica fairly early in the film. I vaguely recall some moments that grabbed my attention, and there is some Abby backstory flashbacks, which suggest that the place induces some level of madness in the residents, but I began Eternal Sunshining my mind of the plot soon after watching it. Even the promise of an apocalypse was not enough to sustain my interest. Please, no more SyFy Films!