10.5
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Movie Reviews of 10.5
Movie Review: excellent movie
Summary: 4 Stars
Loved it. Well done for a TV movie. As with all disaster flicks parts are a little cheesy, but this one less so than most.Movie Review: "We could be looking at a seismic event larger than modern man has ever witnessed before." - But 10.5 is no great shakes
Summary: 3 Stars
Living in glitzy Los Angeles has its downside, what with the landslides, the fires, the traffic, the smog, the paparazzi, the gangs, the L.A. Clippers... and, yes, the earthquakes. This mini-series 10.5 aired on NBC in 2004 and made a case for relocating to the eastern seaboard, where they only deal with hurricanes and blizzards and frostbite and such. And, really, those things aren't near as awful as the Clippers.
Being neither expert nor fan of earthquakes, I can't tell you how scientifically on point this movie is (but apparently it's not very). But if you're into disaster flicks garnished with television-appropriate special effects and cheesy melodrama and personal angst - and why wouldn't you be? - then 10.5 is worth looking into, but strictly as a guilty pleasure.
A train drops out of sight. A town goes missing. A series of famous landmarks gets demolished, starting with the collapse of Seattle's Space Needle in a quake registering a 7.9 on the Richter scale. This opening sequence proves to be jarring in another way, tailored as it is to an MTV/sports ad sensibility, with some bloke getting tricky on his bicycle - but, of course, you can't out-trick or outrace a force of nature. In short order we meet our cast, most of whom are actually quite relevant to the crisis at hand. There's the President of the United States, played with steadfast resolve by Beau Bridges; Fred Ward's semi-dashing character heads up FEMA; Rebecca Jenkins is the governor of California trying to put up a brave front, even as her family goes missing during the quakes. But, first and foremost, there's Dr. Samantha Hill, as played by Kim Delaney. She's the main protagonist of this thing.
Dr. Hill - or "Sam" - is a brilliant seismologist but a control freak, and as such doesn't work well with others. She's a deep fault expert, and, despite the disbelief of her colleagues, it's her theory which ends up saving the day. Sam speculates that a series of unidentified faults is causing the chain reaction of quakes, each successive one escalating in magnitude. If you've entertained any of the more popular notions of what might happen to California should the Big One come up, well, peep this mini-series.
To round off the cast, there's John Schneider as the governor's ex gone camping with his estranged teen daughter, and I guess nothing cements a father-daughter bond quicker than an impending cataclysm. The daughter, though, is very annoying with all the shrieking and the selfishness and the shrieking. And then there's the cocky surgeon (because there always has to be an arrogant schmoe in these things) and his more reserved fellow doctor, who's having his own family issues.
In the ranks of disaster films, this one doesn't really come close to classics like AIRPORT ((Airport Terminal Pack (Airport/Airport '75/Airport '77/Airport '79 - The Concord)), The Towering Inferno (Special Edition), or The Poseidon Adventure (Special Edition). It's definitely not as entertaining as Volcano, Armageddon or The Perfect Storm. 10.5 is middle-of-the-barrel fare. Except I'll tell you what, shopworn and cliché-ridden this movie might be, but once I tuned in, it was real hard to stop watching. It's like candy corn - you know it's not good for you, you'll feel ashamed in the morning, and you might wake up with nausea. But so what? One hallmark of disaster films is the all-star cast, something which 10.5 is lacking, with due respect to Beau Bridges, John Schneider and Fred Ward. However, I caught this mini-series when it first came out primarily because of Kim Delaney, whose Detective Diane Russell I really dug in NYPD BLUE. Dr. Samantha Hill is actually a pedestrian role, but I still think that Delaney does a fine job with what she's given. Much as she did with Det. Russell, Delaney is able to bring out the wounded vulnerability within the icy, brilliant Sam Hill. Certainly, the movie is at its most interesting whenever she's on camera.
Everything you expect to see crops up sooner or later. The citywide panic. The mass evacuations. The refugee camps. The Californian coastline getting a face lift, and there's some irony there. Also the cheesy dialogue and the personal little dramas which are supposed to provide a humanizing counterpoint to the impersonal awesomeness of Mother Nature. Delaney and John Schneider are good. The other actors vary from decent to derivative. 10.5 does try to switch things up a bit by using various editing tricks, from split frames to jittery close-ups (I was half expecting Jack Bauer to show up somewhere). I will say that these techniques do lend the story a sharper sense of immediacy.
For those interested and willing to sit thru 2 hours 45 minutes of talk, the 10.5 dvd does come with a director's audio commentary. Anyways, 10.5 was good for the ratings and drew in enough viewers that a made-for-television sequel 10.5: Apocalypse came out in 2006, in which Kim Delaney returns but the cheesy is even more in the hizzy. And yet 10.5: APOCALYPSE isn't the worst disaster film of all tme. That honor probably falls on a stinker like AVALANCHE, KRAKATOA - EAST OF JAVA, or JAWS THE REVENGE. SON OF THE MASK, by the way, also counts as a disaster film.
Movie Review: Could Have Been Better
Summary: 3 Stars
There are lots of good things about this movie, but some aspects of it detracted from my enjoyment.
First of all, the camera movement / cinematography tries too hard to be "hip." You can almost hear the producers telling the movie-makers to "shoot this documentary style like you're in the trenches with the people." As a result, the camera clumsily jerks in and out on character faces (way too close, in my opinion), it moves around too much for you to get a grasp on what's happening in many scenes.. it shakes too much in scenes when there's not a QUAKE happening. In my opinion, this clumsy "hip" camera movement (pseudo-MTV style) detracts bigtime from the storytelling of this movie. Just when I got into the movie/story, the herky-jerky camera movements constantly took me out of the experience, reminding me it was just a movie. That is a storytelling failure.
The effects work is great. But there's not enough of it. Why do producers always shortchange the effects work when the film clearly needs more? Come one, man... you want to see effects when your movie is called 10.5. Get some college kids who do effects work at home to do it for free (for experience) or something... spend some money. For example, the destruction of San Fran was represented by the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge and a few token buildings. They forgot there was also a city there, and maybe 5-10 more effects shots (establishing shots) would have sufficed. The final payoff is good, and the entire last sequence was unexpectedly great. I thought the movie was going to end when the heroes did their thing... but it kept going interestingly. The draining river was a chilling, nice touch. Overall, the effects work is great.. just needs more.
The acting was okay. Beau was fantastic, but Delaney was only okay. She seemed bored in her role. I can almost imagine her ragging on the script after the director yelled "cut." To be fair, maybe it wasn't her fault, because the "overeager" camerawork often jerked in and out on her face, trying to create some kind of emotion by closing in on her face from inches away. Maybe they just kept filming to get some kind of "real" touch after the director yelled "cut." I don't know. I thought the Dukes of Hazzard guy was pretty good in his role. So was the doctor... Nolan's son. REMO was great... very believable. I actually felt something for his character at the end.
Overall, it's a good disaster movie if you like that genre. You have to be willing to put up with the above to truly enjoy it. I got it at Wal Mart, but it's not a keeper, in my opinion. I'll trade it in at CD Exchange for something else. Also, no extras at all except for the directory commentary.
Movie Review: Spectacularly Implausible
Summary: 3 Stars
One must give credit to the makers of the 2004 NBC-TV 2-part movie 10.5--they do give us plenty of spectacular special effects in the story of the entire West Coast being reshaped by a chain of enormously destructive earthquakes. What they DON'T give us, however, is a plot that stands up to any close scrutiny for more than a few minutes at the most, and usually no more than a few seconds.
Kim Delaney is the maverick seismologist who insists that there are interlocking earthquake faults ready to erupt and break much of the West Coast away from the rest of the United States--a fear magnified by quakes that topple the Space Needle in Seattle, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Then there is the dreaded southeastern edge of the infamous San Andreas Fault Zone, which passes less than 80 miles from Los Angeles. And unless drastic measures of the W.M.D. kind are tried to repair the fault line, more than Hell will break loose.
Obviously the special effects work was what attracted large viewers to their TVs in May 2004 to watch this $20 million spectacular, and with good reason; the effects ARE the reason to watch it. Beyond all that, however, a good cast which includes Fred Ward, John Schneider, and Beau Bridges, is left out to dry with lousy dialogue, melodramatic situations that wouldn't even have passed muster in any of the disaster films of the 1970s, least of all the 1974 specatcular EARTHQUAKE, and a thoroughly implausible premise.
Still, for the special effects, if nothing else, I am giving this three stars. The scenes of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles all being eaten alive by the ground beneath them are the real reason that "10.5" works at all.
Movie Review: standard TV disaster drama, great special effects
Summary: 3 Stars
I remember at the time that real earthquake scientists didn't know whether to laugh or cry when this one came out. I thought it did OK for a TV disaster drama with the usual divorced parents and their difficulties (except in this case Mom is governor of the state), the brilliant young scientist with the radical, but correct, theory about the quakes- and the tough boss who doesn't believe at first but comes to his senses and ultimately saves the day.
I think the idea of deep faults has now been proven (the writers did say they did their research on the internet)but that idea of fusing them with nuclear blasts doesn't work for me, especially when done at depths of only a few hundred feet. I'd think that trying to fuse something like that would only make it worse either by REALLY cutting things loose or actually fusing and letting pressures build up even more.
What sap would put an evacuee camp on a faultline as they did in this movie?, that was actually the dumbest thing in the whole thing.
The FX were generally good although the quicksand that John Schneider got caught up in looked fake and the breakup of the Golden Gate Bridge did have a model look to it.