Anyway, its depiction of a massive impact is unflinching and brutal. I’ll stress right here that the odds of anything this size hitting us even in the next million years are slim to none. We know of every asteroid this size in the solar system out to terrific distances, and none is slated to ruin our day (or millennium).

But an impact like this would wipe out everything. Everything. As far as I can tell, the depiction there is pretty accurate. Notice how the impact appears to be in slow motion– in reality, the speed is something like 10-20 miles per second. It’s just that the rock is so big, a hundred miles across, things appear to move slowly. The expanding ring of death is moving at the speed of sound, 700 miles an hour. You can see continents lifting up as the shock wave moves through them, vaporizing water, rock, metal. The oceans boil, the crust melts, and, well. There you go.

The only real error I saw, I think, is when the shock wave encircling the Earth finally closes up when it reaches the opposite side of the planet from the impact point. The shock would eject a plume from the other side, like squeezing a watermelon seed between two fingers. We see evidence of this on other bodies; ringed features opposite giant impact craters, where the shock wave from the impact converged on the other side of the world.