bad cinema

Rating: 4/10 (6 June 2004)

Reading the IMDB Message Board with the comments and reactions of viewers is much more interesting than the film itself. I usually know what to expect when I go to a disaster movie, so I bought my popcorn and entered the theater to see the big effects, not some cinema masterpiece. I must say that I was still very disappointed. After reading all the press articles, and seeing the TV clips, there was no surprise for me in the subject. If you saw the trailers then you saw all the good effects - the rest is quite un-impressive relative to the money that must have been invested. When it is not un-impressive it is really bad - in a couple of instances, you saw actors running off and escaping a huge tidal wave, and the glacial age (yes!) - this was so un-believable. Acting is average minus, although Emmy Rossum and Jake Gyllenhaal have the potential to become big stars. The scientific premises - not of the movie - but of some of the effects like the extreme cooling are so unbelievable and defying the logic, that they look extreme even in Hollywood terms. There is some more truth in details of the script, in the human father-to-son relationship, or in some surprisingly funny ideas like having US refugees flying the Mexican border southbound in some kind of reverse historic irony, but then all falls back and is swollen in flat and bad dialog. The only good thing that will come out of this movie is the theme park ride which may already be in building some place. The grim warning about our future if we ignore ecology deserves a better movie. This one gets 4 out of 10 on my personal scale.