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Picture yourself as a billionaire shipping magnate, your huge oceangoing tanker ships plying the high seas, moving valuable cargo from here to there around the world. But there’s been a problem of late: over the past 12 months, six of your ships have disappeared without a trace, all within the mysterious patch of ocean known as the Bermuda Triangle.

What do you do?

Collect the insurance money and reroute the remaining ships in your flotilla to dodge that part of the Atlantic?

Uh, not exactly. That would make sense, but it wouldn’t make for a very exciting TV movie, now would it?

What you do, see, is you hire a top-notch team of scientists to find out what’s happening to your ships. And if, along the way, they also happen to unravel a spooky mystery that’s intrigued the world for generations, well, so much the better.

That’s pretty much the setup for a new, six-hour miniseries called The Triangle, set to premiere tonight at 9 on the Sci Fi Channel. Subsequent two-hour episodes of the thriller will air at the same time tomorrow and Wednesday nights.

The network is billing the three-parter as a blockbuster event, mostly because it’s the brainchild of two big-screen, action-film heavyweights — Bryan Singer (X-Men) and Dean Devlin (Independence Day) — in their first collaboration. The miniseries boasts hundreds of computer-generated special effects, though many of them weren’t included in the version of the film sent to reviewers.

When the billionaire (Sam Neill, Jurassic Park) goes looking for a team of scientists to crack the secret of the Bermuda Triangle, he finds it’s not easy to recruit them, even for somebody with a bottomless bankroll. He’s eventually forced to make do with a B team consisting of an oceanic engineer (Catherine Bell, from JAG), a meteorology professor (Michael Rogers), a supermarket tabloid reporter (Eric Stoltz), and a psychic (Bruce Davison).

The fact that the tabloid reporter is the most reasonable one in the bunch should be a tip-off to the billionaire that he’s wasting his money, but he somehow overlooks that.

Oh, and another featured character in The Triangle is a Greenpeace activist played by an overwrought Lou Diamond Phillips, who chews up sizeable chunks of time over the movie’s three-night run. The inclusion of his character’s utterly superfluous story line is a mystery every bit as puzzling as the Bermuda Triangle itself. Maybe the producers owed him a favor.

It doesn’t take long for the billionaire’s team to realize there’s something … um, fishy about the area where his ships disappeared. After splashing around in the mystical water for a while, the team members begin experiencing weird things, such as altered versions of reality. One reads his own obituary, while another watches as an acquaintance blows his brains out. Bell’s character discovers a surprising house guest: the mother she never knew.

By the series’ second night, the team has been grabbed by sinister military commandos and stumbled across a government conspiracy that could be far more dangerous than any supernatural terrors the Atlantic might offer.

It seems that back in the ’40s, the U.S. Navy ran secret experiments, trying to make its ships invisible by altering their molecular structure. But oops, things somehow got a little out of hand — as they so often do with secret projects that mess with the laws of nature — and ever since then, some kind of “exotic matter” has been churning around, feeding upon itself in the depths of the Atlantic.

Aha! As we’ve always suspected with UFOs, Bigfoot, gas prices, and so many other unexplained phenomena in this world, we might have guessed that the military was involved. So maybe there really IS a logical explanation for the many strange occurrences in the Bermuda Triangle all these years.

But the Navy's tinkering has inadvertently created a tear - or a ripple, or a hiccup, or something - in the dimensions of time and space, and the world could soon find itself in very big trouble.

In fact, it just so happens that there are only a few hours left before the "crux event" occurs, in which Earth's electromagnetic forces go haywire, the molecular stability of the planet is thrown permanently out of whack, all of humanity passes through a "wormhole," and the Lions make it to the Super Bowl.

Of course, it's up to our intrepid team to stop all this from happening, while Diamond Phillips races around wringing his hands and trying to figure out what he's doing in this movie.

Tonight's airing of The Triangle is timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the disappearance of Flight 19, a squadron of Navy Avenger torpedo bombers lost during a training mission off the coast of Florida. No trace of the missing aircraft or the rescue plane that was sent to find them was ever found. It was this incident that helped solidify the modern-day legend of the Bermuda Triangle.

If this overblown saga doesn't exactly put the legend to rest, at least it makes it a lot funnier than it's ever been before.

Contact Mike Kelly at: mkelly@theblade or 419-724-6131.

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