Audio-book or movie?

Rating: 1/10 (21 July 2012)

This movie obviously have good intentions when the actual survivors helped write this, but in the end, it left me unaffected and bored.
I actually had to stop the movie once and watch it a couple of days later. This is a movie right? It feels more like an audio-book since more than half of the movie takes place in darkness. You can barely make out the people on screen and I actually felt relieved in the scene where fire comes flying by the actors. Finally we can see something! Of course the fire dies out and the screen turns so dark I can see my own reflection. I have seen plenty of other movies and documentaries where people are trapped and it really doesn't need to be this dark.
The script is a complete disaster. When Jimeno is brought to the hospital and his wife talks to him... I actually felt bad for the actors. It was so cheesy and so predictable it made me cringe. In fact, most of the script in this movie is either incredibly cheesy or way over the top. I felt bad for McLoughlin having to listen to Jimeno while they are trapped, his voice becomes nails on a chalkboard. So as you can imagine: Having to listen to that grating voice while you can barely make out the characters or anything on the screen... ugh!
I feel bad writing this as I know the two wives helped write this, but I found both their characters annoying. And their relatives were as well, especially Jimenos relatives. They seemed to come from those comedies where the in-laws/relatives are obnoxious and pure horror to be around. One of Donnas children comes off as a spoiled brat with no manners and the rest of the children are fillers with no personality. Heck, even the wives themselves have no personality, they are just whining and crying that they are missing their husbands. When they are reunited with their husbands I felt nothing! The only character who seemed remotely like-able and I wanted to give a hug was the black woman at the hospital. And she was on the screen for tops 5 minutes. Maggie's character (who I honestly can't remember the name of) is apparently so distraught that her relatives gets her medication to prevent a miscarriage, but you never get the feeling of her being this distressed. Most of the time she just walks around with the same expression on her face, you can never tell what she is feeling. When they actually suggest to the character the medication she just seems like she would say "Okay, sure." with a shrug on the shoulders. But because of her constant devoid staring, I have no clue what the character was supposed to feel.
I feel this movie would have been much better if the movie had started with developing the families in their every day life, then have the disaster and them worried about their husbands. These random flashbacks while they are trapped makes it very hard to relate to anyone of them.
I'm sure the real people are a lot more interesting than portrayed in this movie and I felt more sorry for the people involved by reading about the survivors on Wikipedia than while watching this "audio-book" devoid of emotion.