Could this film have been any worse? I shudder at the thought.

Rating: 2/10 (14 May 2005)

I must say I haven't watched this movie from the beginning, meaning I lost most of the action and special effects. But to be brutally honest, I couldn't care less about special effects. With all the technology we have, special effects like those are the absolute least I could expect from a movie like this. And the things I should expect from a decent movie are all absent here. Just look at the "Goofs" section and at other comments here to see the insane amount of plot holes and blatant inaccuracies, not to mention idiotic, braindead plot devices: e.g., a ship ending up right in front of the library Sam and his fellows are in, which MUST HAVE SOME MEDICINE that should save his love interest, who has an infection - such infection obviously diagnosed by some lady who just happened to read about it on a Medicine book! Geez, one doesn't need to look too closely into the movie to notice flaws like that.
But what really adds insult to the injury here is... What does this movie stand for? A laughably unsubtle critique against the Bush administration? An action-packed CGI-infested blockbuster? Melodrama? See, the entire second half of the movie is spent on telling the adventures of Sam and his friends, while his father comes to save him. I didn't care at all about any of the characters (how well developed they were!), and instead, I was just wondering what was happening to... well, the rest of the world. I didn't see anything that really mattered: instead, I was seeing stupid, insipid melodrama and teenagers (acted by rather old actors, no less) being attacked by wolves. The movie wasn't even funny due to the amount of blatant inaccuracies in the movie. Science has been deeply insulted.
And in the very end, we're treated to a Cheney-lookalike Vice President saying good things Third World countries (as a Brazilian, I wasn't flattered AT ALL, mind you), while the Statue Of Liberty stood tall and proud amidst all the snow in New York. A bad movie trying to deliver a message across, with all the wit and intelligence of a clear and transparent hailstone - the likes of which you only see in Emmerich movies. Someone out there definitely needs to make a movie to alert the world about the danger of braindead disaster films.