Some impressive special effects and not much else

Rating: Null/10 (1 June 2004)

Spoiler If you've seen the trailer, you've already seen the best this film has to offer.
Los Angeles being ravaged by multiple tornadoes and New York being literally drowned by the Atlantic Ocean...but you already knew that.
As for the rest of the film...
Well, once the world is laid to waste by the forces of nature or "acts of God" as insurance people like to call them, Jake Gyllenhaal and his mates basically sit around in a library burning books to keep warm and exchange some of the most cheesily-written and downright embarrassing dialogue that i have heard since seeing Gigli, which just like this film was an error born out of curiosity to see "what all the fuss was about".
Dennis Quaid also waltzes his way through this turgid tripe trying to pull the most serious face and decides, after telling everyone "NOT TO GO OUTSIDE OR YOU WILL ALL FREEZE TO DEATH", to go outside into the snow and ice covered world to walk to New York to find his son.
Predictably, two of the companions who heroically decide to travel with Dennis Quaid, die predictably dull and meaningless deaths but the weird thing is that their deaths don't make any difference to this film or Dennis Quaid's character either.
They both die and Dennis Quaid forgets about them and continues to walk to New York, despite the fact that we know that his character has worked closely with these two men for a number of years and for such tragic losses they should be to him - he seems to take their rather tragic deaths extremely well, in that they die and Dennis Quaid doesn't really seem to be heartbroken by the events at all.
Basically those two deaths are desperate plot fillers for a story that already ran out of any heat and steam right after New York has been flushed out by a huge tsunami.
Another desperately sad plot filler is when a ship comes floating spookily past the library Gyllenhaal and his mates and they decide to raid the boat for food, for some reason some wolves that escaped from a nearby zoo have managed to escape being drowned and turned into fishfood in order to chase them through the ships many narrow corridors for a minute before going back into the library to wait for Daddy Quaid to save him.
And its a bit obvious what happens at the end of the film, lots of people survive and everyone smiles cos despite the fact that half our planet has been turned into a series of Haagen Dazs metropolises, the underlying message is that in the face of such tragedy - we all find hope in our hearts and minds to keep perpetuating life, despite the fact that i thought the movie was designed to tell us to start thinking carefully about what we are doing to our own planet.
The worst thing about this entire film, apart from the script, dialogue and acting, was the fictionalised parts of the story - "global cooling" where everything is frozen within one second????.
So in a cheap desperate bid to rush the story forward and save on special effects costs, we are to led to assume that when this global cooling nonsense happens, it turns millions of people from the length and breadth of Canada to Europe and also the Middle East and most of Asia into human popsicles within a matter of seconds despite the fact that the many denizens of Washington and New York don't seem to be affected at all by global cooling and go out walking in the snow as if they're dreaming of a white Christmas.
There was so much Roland Emmerich could've done with this film and such great potential has been wasted on an extremely flimsy and weak script, there is little or no character development and you don't really care for any of the characters at all and after Emmerich has had fun destroying the world yet again, the story literally grinds to a halt and limps painfully toward the finish line.
If you need to know anything about this film, just watch the trailer and save both your money and a couple of hours of your life by not watching this entire film.
The only spectacles to behold are two disaster sequences and nothing more.
Its the end of the world as we know it, and i'm feeling sleepy
Easily the worst film of the year so far.....2 out of 10 for the two special effects sequences alone