Irwin Allen must still be alive and working!

Rating: 4/10 (13 June 2004)

I grew up during the seventies when all those disaster flicks came out and with the exception of a few of them they were all pretty cheesy and silly. Now thirty years later we can all rest assured that Hollywood is still making silly and unbelievable disaster films. This story starts out with a respected Climatologist named Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) who along with his cohorts in the Antarctica discover that the climate of the earth is about to change and that another Ice Age is about to happen! No sooner than you can open an umbrella there are tornadoes ripping apart Los Angeles and Europe is covered with 15 feet of snow. Jack's teenage son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in New York City with his friends from school when a gigantic tidal wave puts the whole city underwater. Then the cold front comes in and everything starts to freeze but Sam is told by his father to stay put in the library because he is coming to get him.
*****SPOILER ALERT*****
A small group stays in the library while the rest of the country freezes and Jack decides to drive and then walk to New York to find his son. While in the library they burn books to keep warm but they need to get medicine and food to stay alive and while all of this is going on there is a mass exodus to Mexico where it is warmer.
This film is directed by Roland Emmerich who has directed other big budget blockbusters and unfortunately for him the pattern seems to be the same. He's quite adept at handling the scenes with special effects and action but when it comes to the characters he's at best clumsy. The effects are the star of the film and it's due to the fact that the characters are all badly written. Emmerich uses as many cliches as he can in this story such as Sela Ward staying back with the sick child in the hospital. You have to wonder why it took Gyllenhaal and his pals so long to finally go out and search for food and medicine and we also get scenes with characters arguing about which books should be burned and which ones to save. I didn't hate this film and it's mainly because of the attraction of watching Los Angeles get torn apart by tornadoes but lets face it, this is a very silly and badly written film. I'll go on record right now and say that "The Poseidon Adventure" is a much better film. Emmerich can handle action scenes as well as anyone in Hollywood but when it comes to dialogue for characters he should definitely let someone else write the script.