10.5: Apocalypse
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Movie Reviews of 10.5: Apocalypse
Movie Review: Not quite the stature of "Volcano" (1997)
Summary: 2 Stars
Fake mountains and secondary actors produce the formula disaster movie. All disaster movies have the fun formula. Many try to get at least one know actor to hold it together; this movie has chosen Remo Williams (Fred Ward).
Anyone notice the train is missing?
Daddy, don't leave me!
Where are the gas masks when you need them?
A series of earthquakes kill stupid people and as they get more stupid the shocks get larger. Will the quakes stop in time or all the stupid people doomed?
If you are watching this movie I suggest you stand in the door jam and hold on.
Movie Review: Amazon U.K. Sucks
Summary: 2 Stars
Under no circumstances ever use Amazon U.K. they are not the same company as Amazon U.S. Amazon U.K. customer service is terrible, they double shipped an item to me and gave me the run around tyring to return it. Their customer service can barely understand English and they never followed through on any request I forwarded, or answered any complaints. Amazon U.K. simply does not care if your unhappy with a product, received two or three in the same order etc. Tough, they don't careMovie Review: Hokey
Summary: 2 Stars
I found this movie to be hokey as hell, and the acting was second rate. But as escapist fare, it was also great fun.Movie Review: I Pity You NBC!
Summary: 1 Stars
Bad script. Worse science. Throw in some good actors and computer animation to make it seem realistic ... but oh! It doesn't work. Not anymore, NBC. Asteroid was bad. This is worse. You can start with the title, which plagiarizes the title of yet another completely-ignorant-of-science disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow. (Unlike this, however, TDAT was actually a pretty good movie.)
That in a nutshell describes NBC's 10.5 Apocalypse.
It starts where the original 10.5 left off. Now, I didn't like that movie either, but at least they got right the fact that there is a lot of seismic activity on the West Coast. But then California fell into the ocean. You get the idea that the show's producer got jilted by some Hollywood starlet, and that's why they insisted on destroying Los Angeles and the Hollywood sign. Or, more likely, they just copied every disaster flick since 1990. The scientific problem with that movie is that a.) they turned two fault zones with completely different motions into what is essentially a rift valley, b.) they missed a very good opportunity to show how seismologists actually measure the magnitude of an earthquake - which, by the way, does not increase as the earthquake gets longer, c.) they forgot that nuclear weapons are better at creating or triggering earthquakes than stopping them, and d.) they forgot to realize that magnitude 10.5 earthquakes only happen as the result of asteroid impacts. They could have combined 10.5 and Asteroid and been right about a few things.
Well, apparently the earthquake the seismologists started to stop the West Coast from sinking into the Pacific caused a tsunami. Goodbye Hawaii. Then next, the volcanoes in the Cascades start going off one by one. I suppose they forgot to research that too. Although a movement along the Cascadia subduction zone would feed a little extra crust into the area, resulting in a few extra eruptions perhaps, that process would take at least a hundred (thousand?) years or more. I don't know, I'm not a geologist, but I'm thinking they hurried things up for the sake of time. Well, I suppose that's forgiveable.
This is where we are introduced to a pair of brothers who insist on working out their struggles during the heat of a rescue mission, completely ignoring protocol. Their little argument about who leads the pair will wear you out through the rest of the movie. So ... Sam Hill's father, the great earthquake genius who conveniently predicted everything that happens in the two movies, is stuck in a Las Vegas that is slowly sinking beneath the ground. (Gee, you would have thought he would have gone somewhere he knew was safe.) Meanwhile her boyfriend is reading the temperature of Lake Mead, and instead of calling out a rate of temperature increase, he decides to yell out the temperature every four seconds, making him so stupid that he tells his pilot to fly him below the level of the dam, *after* saying that the dam will break from an earthquake or something. Well, he dies and Sam Hill seems briefly upset. Then she's back onto the mission like nothing happened. Sucks to be him.
Meanwhile, there's a fault line that insists on targeting Mount Rushmore snaking across the Midwest where there is no fault line. Pause.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have the fault start in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which is where the North American plate attempted to rift itself apart some hundreds of millions of years ago? They could have made their fault follow the course of the Mississippi River! But they didn't. Unpause.
Our famous band of brothers is called in to save other members of the cast in Las Vegas. Conveniently Sam Hill's father is able to make his way up and through the various levels of the building without much help. Our genius/hero is rescued along with a few strippers he brought with him, and the big brother dies a theatrical death, since it was apparently easier to kill one of them than to have them resolve their conflict.
So the Midwestern fault is snaking toward a nuclear reactor. This time, the bright idea is to use explosives that are a million times less powerful than the atomic bombs they used to "save" the West Coast to divert a fault that is about ten times the size of the San Andreas. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. But it works ... briefly and inexplicably so. Nature ultimately wins and splits the nation in two with a 50 mile wide channel of water.
Now, think on this. The fault has probably already killed a few million people, having gone through Dallas and Houston, and it's already destroyed George Washington's stone face on Mt. Rushmore. But the President and his scientist hacks are upset only *after* the fault reaches the Gulf of Mexico? Give me a break. After all those people dying, having a canal through the Midwest, opening up tons of new places for sea trade, imports and exports, plus delivering a whole lot of water (albeit salt water) to the often dry Plains states, seems like a pretty good thing, even if it does split the country in two. So why is everybody so upset about it now? Indonesia is made of at least 10,000 islands. I'm guessing they would all be on Prozac if they saw this movie ... or half a bottle of Ambien. And, of course, we get the comforting speech at the end. It seems to be more of a discourse on the political tensions in the US after the 2004 Presidential election between Kerry and Bush than a fitting end for the movie.
So there you have it. Spoilers and all. I'm very happy to spoil it for you. Now you can go watch a much cooler movie with much better acting and plot, like Twilight.
Movie Review: I originally was going to give two stars...
Summary: 1 Stars
...just because this silly movie is one of those that has the potential to be one that's so bad it ends up being "good," i.e. trying so hard to be serious that it ends up being unintentionally hilarious. I'll leave aside the predictable plot twists (e.g. "let's all celebrate now, 'cause we've beaten it, oh wait, oh my God, turns out we're not out of the woods yet"), and the ridiculous scientific premise, 'cause after all this is supposed to be science fiction/disaster/adventure, and there's no law written saying that reality suspension is necessarily bad in such a movie. A lot of the comedy potential is in the nauseatingly petty, overacted middle-school drama going on between supposedly adult characters--which they somehow have the time and energy to indulge in even while the entire world is crumbling around them. This lends itself to derisive laughter as well as cynical contempt for all concerned--you might find yourself rooting for the ever-expanding crack in the earth to swallow them all up and give a nice, juicy, self-satisfied belch. This movie could thus end up being a cult classic.
However, all this comedic potential is ruined by the annoying, amateurish camera work--the entire movie feels like it was filmed by some 8-year old who just discovered the zoom function on his parents' video camera. In and out, in and out, in a little further, whoops, a little too much, so pan back out just a smidge, then zoom in again so fast it makes your head spin. This goes on in EVERY SINGLE SCENE, the idea being, I suppose, to create "drama" or "tension." But such a gimicky technique is simply being used here to try to artificially infuse drama into the most banal of scenes. In this it fails miserably, succeeding only in creating intense irritation and utter loathing for the cameraman, the editors, the director, the producers, indeed the entire movie. My suggestion: don't waste your money on this cheesy dreck--even only one star is too much for this clunker-- if you feel like you can't live without seeing it, wait until it appears again on one or more of the cable channels--which it seems to do with startlingly contemptible regularity. And if you are the sort of person who DOES feel like they NEED to see a movie like this, then, well, I'm at a total loss for words...