Awesome effects throughout the movie, but that's it.

Rating: 7/10 (15 November 2009)

Firstly, I have to get something off my chest concerning all these 1/10 or 10/10 "reviews" here. I really hope IMDb has some sort of intelligent scoring system to weed these morons out, as it goes without saying there is no way this movie could be worth one star. It features some of the most expensive, state of the art CGI I've seen to date, and that alone warrants more respect. But also, that alone doesn't make it worth 10, so weed all those wackos out as well. It's disappointing that a reasonably respected forum as this allows these idiots to vote, when they can't do it in a pseudo-subjective manner.
Enough of that rant, let's get down to the movie. Went to see it today with the wife. Came back with my ears ringing after two and a half hours of almost continuous effects and explosions. I won't go into the plot as there's no much to mention: the earth is heating up from the inside, and it's (of course) happening extremely fast (as in: we have days instead of decades or centuries) and whole of humankind will soon be wiped out.
There were a couple of surprises in the plot, which was nice. Also a few completely out of the blue moments of humor, which had the entire theatre Laughing Out Loud. A nice contrast and relief to the otherwise constant suspense and action.
Acting: I certainly wouldn't predict any awards here, but it was all good and believable. Mostly. Oliver Platt and Danny Glover were excellent and touching at times.
Effects department: We all knew this already, it's constantly at the awesome level apart from a few distinct moments of "that looks fake" but believe me, the good moments outshine the little flaws. The physics modeling of the effects, the attention to detail, is absolutely overwhelming at times. That combined to the sound effects, is all pure win.
The bad: too many close escapes. This has been mentioned here before, and I agree, some of the main cast should have died multiple times. But this being Hollywood, that can't happen of course even if that means bending the laws of _everything_ beyond the point that even the viewer will see it. I think we could have been happy with a few more seconds or even minutes of escape time in many of the sequences, and it wouldn't have made much difference to the outcome of the movie.
Overall, it's a decent watch. If you're a fan of disaster movies, you won't want to miss out on this. Highest body count of them all.