Pretty bad

Rating: 3/10 (14 June 2004)

Not a lot of good movies in the theaters on this blow-off afternoon, so I thought I'd go see something mindless. Mission accomplished!
*** A MASSIVE LIST OF SPOILERS FOLLOWS, AS IF YOU REALLY CARE ***
The premise is that the global melting of glaciers causes a sudden shift in ocean currents, shutting down the Gulf Stream and plunging the Northern Hemisphere into an Ice Age in a week. OK, fine. The premise of cinema itself involves willful suspension of disbelief at some point. Fair enough. I can accept this concept and watch the movie.
But I can only suspend so much disbelief. It only took about ten minutes before I found myself shaking my head. A partial list of stupidities follows: The galley cart careening down the aisle of the plane in heavy turbulence. Killer tornadoes ripping down half of downtown L.A. (and causing an earthquake at the same time) - oh, but only after hitting their first target, the Hollywood sign. Helicopters suddenly falling from the sky because it's too cold. NASA having to ask space station astronauts if the clouds are dissipating, even though we have dozens of weather satellites orbiting the earth. Cellphones still working when all of New York is underwater and without power. Our protagonist having enough time to run half a block, grab his prospective girlfriend from a cab and escape to safety while a 100 foot high wall of water bears down on him. Already-frozen objects icing up when a blast of -150 F air hits them. Our protagonist's father surviving a hike from Philly to New York in weather so cold "you freeze to death in seconds". A container ship gliding a mile or more up a New York avenue without hitting any buildings. Timber wolves chasing three kids around said ship when there must be hundreds of thousands of dead bodies around for them to eat. Seven people in the poorly insulated New York Public Library being the only survivors of the big storm, among two million. Said survivors debating whether to burn a Gutenberg Bible for heat when they've got literally tons of magazines and pulp novels to burn instead.
Once you get beyond the things that are physically unbelievable, you realize that to make this pseudo-scientific drama more human, the writers have incorporated more worn-out plot devices than you can preserve for eternity in the Bering Glacier: the budding teen romance, the more-confident kid who threatens it, the distant father, the conniving vice president. And what bad movie of this genre would be complete without a British-accented scientist at some point uttering, "My God!" At one point I found myself speculating whether this movie might have what it takes to become a campy cult classic.
What amuses me is that in Real Life, our president has ordered NASA and NOAA not to speak to the press about this movie. Presumably they are afraid to fuel the public's concerns about climate change. They have nothing to worry about. Any scientist who confirmed the theories in this movie would have to be even nuttier (or more "bought") than the rare few who deny the existence of climate change. It's really too bad this movie was so over the top, because climate change is a serious issue, rational discussion of which is undermined by the blatant unbelievability of this movie.
On the good side, the special effects are pretty spectacular and more realistic-looking than a lot of what I've seen the last couple of years. As a result, I have to give this one 3/10.