Special effects can't rescue this disaster

Rating: 3/10 (20 January 2005)

Disaster movies must convince one not only that something very bad and unforeseen can happen, but also that the victims deserve sympathy, which requires acting.
What could be more disastrous than the destruction of the great centers of civilization by a moving mountain of ice that grinds or crushes everything in its path? That's enough to bring instant overpopulation in a world whose resources are vastly diminished, which isn't quite the same as complete destruction of either humanity or the world, as through worldwide volcanism or the explosion of the sun.
The budget goes to special effects at the expense of writing and acting, as is shown in this effort at a politically-correct warning that human activities may bring the swift demise of their world. All dialogue is a shout (which is tiresome) except for the implausible monologue at the end. Much of the rest is mocked-up news footage, and there's only so much of that that we can accept.
It is scientifically implausible, which isn't the worst offense, but that does destroy much of the credibility. Although some glacial advances came very far very fast, they certainly did not arise from the freezing of floodwater, and didn't take a few weeks. A few decades, to be sure, but that scientific fact (distressing enough!) would tear at the plot. It is possible to play a sort of game of logging the scientific absurdities, but surely you have better things to do in life than to watch and analyze a dreadful flick.
Part of it is -Twister- on a larger scale (Los Angeles); the wolf scene is an obvious rip-off of -Jurassic Park-. Nothing is really new except for the scale of the disaster, and scale is not enough to redeem an unwieldy plot.