Instantly Forgettable  mostly we froze, who cares?

Rating: 7/10 (5 June 2004)

There will not be many spoilers in this review, as there really isn't that much to spoil. This movie has a lot of special effects, and many of them are excellent, but it doesn't have much of anything else to promote it to a potential audience member. Therefore, I could only say save your money and hire it on DVD, preferably when Blockbuster are doing a rent one, get one free deal, then you can pick a good movie to watch after this one.
The worst thing about this movie is it is like Deep Impact in its character depictions  the characters are wooden, stereotyped and lacking in any real depth, so quite frankly you don't care if they live or die, and there are so few of them as well that you really feel there is not enough plot to drive this movie for the length of time we have to endure it.
And what is it with disaster movies  why does nobody believe the so-called experts until it is too late? Dennis Quaid was OK in his scientific role, but really he was pretty one-dimensional and he can act a lot better than this (see Frequency if you don't believe me).
The silly little romance between Jake Gyllenhal and whoever she was, was trite and seemed to be thrown in to give the plot a little more story, but it was a non-starter really.
We didn't even have the ubiquitous old lady to kill off (like in Daylight and Dante's Peak), or the truly lovable dog to save (like in Independence Day, Dante's Peak and Daylight), I mean there was a dog with a homeless guy, but who cared about him anyway?
I would give most of the special effects in this movie a 7 out of 10  they were good but nothing really new. The acting would only get a 5, as most of the actors didn't seem to be doing much. The plot, even though it's topical, would get a 3, as it seemed mostly to be ludicrous and full of itself.
Someone should tell the producers of this movie that a big budget and loads of effects do not make a good movie, a good script does!