Chewing gum for the eyes.

Rating: Null/10 (4 July 2004)

I went just to see the special effects in TDAT and they were fine, just what I expected of a modern Hollywood escapist blockbuster; I hadn't expected a halfway decent plot, character development or dialogue, so I wasn't disappointed with the film as it stood, that is to say, it was totally devoid of any of those things. But it left me hungry for something on a similar theme which was at least remotely intellectual so I watched Robert Altman's flawed film, "Quintet", again. Prescient, brutal, dispassionate and certainly a film that divides even devotees of his work. In view of the facile material in TDAT, I had to reappraise Quintet as a better film than I remembered and I certainly recommend you watch these two films about ice-age apocalypse one after the other, if only to realize how much TDAT is typical of the dumbing-down of Hollywood movies. That's not to say that Quintet is a great film, but it's certainly more thoughtful than TDAT.