You have got to be kidding me.

Rating: 2/10 (12 December 2005)

Will there ever again be a big budget film that maintains some semblance of originality? This pathetic display of a film is detestable, and the people who decided to create, market, and actually charge money for this film should be bludgeoned.
Think about it. When you produce a film with this many digital effects and such grand scenery, you must have seen something to it that made it worth the while. Well, obviously, actor agents didn't think so. I don't know who was considered for the parts, but when the best casting you can do is a washed up Dennis Quaid and a kid with an infectious smile in Jake Gyllenhaal (And by "infectious", I mean something that you would take lots of drugs to alleviate as soon as possible) it should throw up a red flag.
So that's it! Those are your Big Names. As a producer, I might think, 'wait a minute. I am producing this huge Hollywood hit, and all of these agents said no and we had to take our 10th or 11th picks in many cases, and brought in new faces in others. Maybe this isn't as great as I thought.' Granted, I know little about the movie making process in respect to this aspect, but can they not pull the plug on a film when it's clearly going to suck? Or are people that shallow to actually consider this film worth their time and money? If you're going to do an end of the world movie, make it about the end of the world.
From horrible foreshadowing about a girl who scraped her leg needing penicillin, to escaped wolves (which don't naturally attack human beings anyway. A little research actually shows that there are few, if any, documented wolf attacks on humans anyhow) which are poorly animated, this movie offers little more than an overcoming of insurmountable odds to bring a family back together and two bring two young people together in love.
The scale of the reuniting story was far inferior to the aspect of the 'overnight' arrival of the next ice age. If you're going to have a plot based on such a grand catastrophe, show us more of the effect it has on world-life as a whole. Don't just show us one exceptional climatologist and his son and their story. If the temperature dropped to sub-zero temperatures tomorrow and such a catastrophe actually occurred, the history books that would be read by survivors would discuss much more than what happened to Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal. They would discuss the effect it had on every society in the world. While you can't make a two-hour movie that explains every bit in detail, at least follow a couple of different story lines. Independence Day did it fairly successfully. Hell, ID's spoof Mars Attacks! even did a better job of this. If you're going to emulate someone else's work, at least take the time to recreate the aspects that made the story good. Make it appealing to respective intelligence, instead of just to the visual and auditory senses.
My initial reaction of the film being unoriginal is basically that I saw this movie as a combination of all of the recent natural/major disaster films we have all been privy to. From the bringing together of estranged family members that Jeff Goldblum's Character and his wife accomplish in Independence Day, to the hero status accomplished by a person who, by normal standards, holds a seemingly nominal position such as a tornado chaser, or for sake of my argument, and climatologist, or even a seismologist or an astronomer, this movie took pages right out of the handbook for creating movies about catastrophes. I am not saying that these people do not hold important jobs, but as a world community, we hope that it's our governments and armies having to prevent worldly disasters as opposed to people who have to help avoid full world destruction.
Luckily, I never had high expectations for this movie, which is why I have not seen it until now. I was waiting for something else to start on TV because I woke up a little early, and this was on a cable movie channel, so I gave it a look. As with all movies, good and bad, I will usually sit through anything so I can legitimately praise or bash it accordingly. All things being equal, however, my time would have been much better spent if my system had not gotten me up two hours before I had planned. In other words, I should have stayed in bed.