What an awful film - a walk in a blizzard would be more fun

Rating: 1/10 (12 February 2007)

I watched this yesterday because my daughter insisted on us turning it on; the film failed miserably to reach my very low expectations.
A diabolic mix of bad science, weak plotting, worse dialogue and ethno-centrism. Some people have praised the special effects but I found them tedious and uninspiring and about as scary as a sleepy kitten. There was a montage of a snowbound New York that would not have looked out of place in the cardboard sets of a worse than average 1950s sci-fi film.
The science started poor and got worse, the north Atlantic currents were shown going anti-clockwise instead of clockwise, hurricanes which get their energy from warm water somehow started over ice-cold land and so on. When Sam climbs his way round a ship in far sub-zero temperatures he puts his bare hand onto metal without his skin being ripped off, nice trick if you can manage it, and everyone gets soaked in freezing water without any fear of hypothermia...
Plotting, Jack sets off to walk to New York, will he get there? Well, I won't ruin the suspense for anyone not able to work out the answer.
Ethno-centrism: after cursory chaos in India and Japan we concentrate on the US with short asides to Scotland, suddenly on the same latitude as northern Canada and Siberia, where the surprising reaction to disaster is to pour three stiff glasses of 12 year old scotch.
When half the population of the US migrates to Mexico we see the heroic feeding of the refugees, but what happened to the Mexicans in the freezing cold?
As far as the dialogue goes - not very far I must say - I have managed not to remember any of the lines that made me groan out loud. I've just looked at the 'memorable quotes' and I can't bear to type any of them out. If those are the high spots, imagine the rest.
There are good films to be made on global warming that are more thrilling than Al Gore's, what a pity they wasted money on this instead.