Aftershock: Earthquake in New York
Tags: tragedy

Plot synopsis:
While Dori Thorell (Sharon Lawrence) and her 9-year-old son, Danny (Michal Suchánek), eat breakfast, Sam Thorell (Garwin Sanford) calls from his business trip. Ballerina Diane Agostini (Jennifer Garner) is on the phone with her father when a blender shakes off the counter. Dismissing it, she ends the call and rushes off to a rehearsal session at the New York City Ballet. But she's scolded for being late. Public defender Evie Lincoln (Lisa Nicole Carson) talks with her client Joshua Bingham (JR Bourne) about his case. That evening, tremors cause a gas leak at Diane's apartment complex. Though the electricity is still on in the evacuated building, Fire Chief Thomas Ahearn (Tom Skerritt) sends his crew inside. The building explodes, killing several men. At a party at Gracie Mansion, Evie's grandmother Emily Lincoln (Cicely Tyson) chastises her for being late. Her father, Mayor Bruce Lincoln (Charles S. Dutton), coerces her into going to a job interview at a big law firm.
The next day, Ahearn drops his daughter, Christine, off at high school. She expresses annoyance at his quitting to get "revenge" against the "stupid" mayor over budgeting issues. At the courthouse, Joshua is found not guilty of murdering his invalid wife. Diane meets her father for lunch to get money. When she leaves, she catches a cab driven by recent Russian immigrant Nikolai Karvoski (Fred Weller). A massive earthquake hits the city, toppling many buildings and structures. Nikolai's cab is smashed by falling debris, forcing Nikolai and Diane to flee down the street. A gas main explodes as the sidewalk pushes up between them. Diane saves his life after he falls and catches on fire. In the subway tunnel, the train Evie and Joshua are riding derails after the tunnel collapses. After the earthquake stops, Diane, accompanied by Nikolai, goes back to the restaurant and finds her father fatally injured. He dies after telling her he is proud of her. In the subway, Joshua wants to leave the badly injured driver and any other survivors to get out, but before he can convince Evie and the others to leave they hear someone calling for help.
Chief Ahearn returns to his fire station to find the building partially collapsed. With the central dispatch system down, he contacts Jillian Parnell (Erika Eleniak-Goglia), a reporter for WCBS-TV, who is flying over the city, to get an update on the situation. Both 1 Police Plaza and City Hall have collapsed, and he asks them to come pick him up. At the church, an injured Emily wakes up to find a teenage boy (Ray J) that she helped get a job there is searching her wallet, but moves to try to find a way out after seeing she is still alive. Despite her protests, Nikolai initially remains with Diane as she tries to find her mother, but they eventually part ways. Ahearn sees that his daughter's school has collapsed, but continues on to Central Park where a temporary camp is being set up. He finds the Mayor and they agree to ignore Ahearn's resignation and put aside their differences to help the citizens of their city. A large break in the sewer is causing hundreds of gallons of water to begin flooding into the subway system.
Ahearn goes to his daughter's school after learning there are survivors. Christine is among the three survivors, but she dies during an aftershock before they can free her. At the church, Emily learns that the boy has no name, just a street name. She asks him to take the name of her late son, Clayton, who died as a baby. Shortly after, he is able to escape through a break in the ceiling and get help. Dori arrives at Danny's school where she learns he is stuck on the top floor and rescue efforts are failing. Sam arrives as Dori prepares to scale the building to save their son. Diane finds looters in her mother's apartment, but Nikolai arrives and finds a note saying her mother is at a friends. The mayor arrives at the hospital where he learns his mother is dead. He thanks Clayton for trying to help her and asks Ahearn to try to help the boy, who is despondent over not being able to save her.
In the subway, Joshua, Evie, and one other survivor, Allen (Roger R. Cross), break from the others and find a ladder out. Joshua climbs up, followed by Evie. As Allen is climbing, Joshua breaks the ladder. He confirms Evie's growing suspicions that he did kill his wife and attacks her. When he hears someone coming, he tries to escape up another ladder but an aftershock breaks it and he is killed. Evie points her rescuers to where the other survivors are waiting. Dori successfully climbs the school, where Danny has to jump into her arms. The cable breaks, but they land safely on an inflated mat below and are reunited with Sam.
At the end of the film, the city is shown still being rebuilt a year later. Mayor Lincoln and Ahearn are now close friends; Dori and Sam are shown teaching Danny how to rock-climb; and Diane is a prima ballerina and married to Nikolai.

Review: But this movie is surprisingly well written, effective and does its best to avoid disaster movie clichés, albeit not always successful.
Like its predecessor "EarthQuake" it focuses on the effect of a disastrous earthquake on the lives of several groups of people whom struggle to survive and find loved ones amongst the devastation.
As far as the special effects go it doesn't have all the flashy effects other quake movies do but what it does show is pretty convincing, they seemed to realize their own production limitations and wisely try worked around them without pushing it too far.
Good movie, reminiscent of the 70's disaster films!.
It had several sub-plots going on simultaneously, including a love story, the resolution of an old rivalry, and a parent's fight to absolve herself of guilt over a two-year accident.
Unlike the writers, I understand the geology under NYC, so I was expecting it to be every bit as bad as "Volcano", based on a similarly silly premise.
However, the writers, while technically clueless, did craft one of the best disaster flick scripts I've ever seen.
The acting is uniformly excellent, and the direction, after the typically slow disaster flick setup, was taut and effective.
The special effects were quite decent for TV - certainly better than most SciFi channel made-for-TV films.
Altogether a very involving film, which is, after all, the goal of all disaster flicks.Given a chance, I will watch it again (I missed the first 10 minutes or so).
I didn't have great expectations for this TV movie, but it did not even live up to those meager hopes for a decent disaster flick.
The special-effects are not exceptionally good-- no better than most films today.
After an earthquake in a city that is mostly unprepared for such an event, one would think there would be a great deal more devastation.
I realize that special effects are expensive, but to me, the directors and script-writers of these films don't seem to want to make any effort to make a truly "disastrous" film.(One last point, NY City seems to get picked on a great deal in disaster films: AFTERSHOCK, DEEP IMPACT, ARMAGEDDON, GODZILLA, FAIL SAFE, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and others such as DIE HARD 3, and THE SIEGE.).
As a former New Yorker, and watching it in this post-9/11 era, it was truly eerie, especially since in this film, one of the few sites left standing and untouched was...
the Twin Towers.This movie is based on a novel by one of NY's most familiar faces, former NBC newscaster, and my 'regular' source of info in my NY days, Chuck Scarborough.
Besides the story and text, the scenes and special effects were awesome (even though you *know* looking at them that it's not real).This will no doubt prove to be the first in many similar disaster films that will be made about NY, be they natural or terrorist, but since this was done three years "before," it makes it more prophecy than mere fiction, and worth seeing..
I'm watching this movie right now, a little over one hour in.
As far as disaster movies go, this is one of the best I've seen in the past 30 years.
Direction is admirable, acting all around is good, this is not a "B" movie, it's very entertaining, not a waste of time..
The disaster films of the 1990's excluding of course " Volcano" (1997 Tommy Lee Jones.)  are just downright bad the special effects are horrible and the characters are pathetic.
If you are going to make a disaster film you need to make them epic.
The Earthquake sequence in this movie leaves you feeling jipped when it is all over with, and then it leaves you with pathetic characters that you don't care much about for the rest of the film.
If you watch the disaster films of the 1970's there was always a feeling for the first twenty minutes or so of those films that something really bad was going to happen, an impending doom that got you more involved in those films.
That is certainly not the case nowadays and especially with " Earthquake In New York".
If you want to see a good disaster film most definetly watch " The Towering Inferno" or " Earthquake" and if you are interested in a more updated disaster film catch " Volcano" with Tommy Lee Jones that movie truly delivers the goods..
This latest entry into straight-to-TV videos sees Tom Skerrit running for his life when disaster hits New York City.
Another predictable, pretentious natural disaster "thriller" made for TV, "Earthquake in New York" does nothing we have not seen before, and accomplishes zip.Boring from start to finish.1.5/5 stars -John Ulmer.
A good movie...for distaster-flick fans:).
It was refreshing for me to see a person in a position of power in an action movie attempt not to abuse such power for his/her own interests.
In this film, he uses these to great effect...my personal favorite being the one he uses when 2 characters escape out from under a truck collapsing underground in the nick of time.
all-in-all, this is an entertaining movie...and a worthy entry into the disaster-film genre.
The piece of crap that aired on CBS bore no relation to the novel other than the fact that an earthquake struck the City of New York.
This is an excellent movie for someone who has never experienced an earthquake; as we all know one does not last for 15 minutes.
If a 15 minute earthquake would have struck New York, it would be in total ruin and not have buildings standing.
I watched this on TV, and all I can say is that it was an awesome movie, with incredible special effects and more than the other stories of destruction, a believable plot line.
I saw that movie is available on video tape, but I'd personally wait for a DVD.
The movie had a good message behind the drama.
the movie drew me in with its top-notch special effects and intriguing character situations--needless to say, for approximately 170 minutes i forgot entirely of any relatives or close friends i may have.
even now, on dreary afternoons when i find myself alone with nothing to do, i like to sit back with a fine, cool glass of lemonade and compile stanza upon stanza of poetry in my head encompassing the various scenes and events, making the movie ever-mine and something that will live forever within my memories..
It has taken 25 years, but through the magic of computers and clever filmmaking, the effects in "Aftershock:  Earthquake in New York" have far and away surpassed the effects in the 1974 disaster epic "Earthquake."Utilizing actual footage of New York City, the effects team on "Aftershock..."  achieved big budget effects for the small screen...
The story and the acting are pretty much TV miniseries stuff, but if for nothing else, see this miniseries for the chilling special effects alone!.
I watched about half of 1999's AFTERSHOCK, and what I saw was a standard TV production about the impact of an earthquake on New York City.
I had no problem with the so-so special effects nor the overly large AIRPORT-type cast, other than Sharon Lawrence as a gin-guzzling middle-aged mom.
It's easy enough to imagine just how much worse the impact of a quake would have on Manhattan than was portrayed in this movie, including a lot more looters and shootings, with rats and corpses and disease and devastation everywhere -- like post-Katrina New Orleans.
Familiar TV faces Tom Skerritt and Charles Dutton ham it up big time as the city's feuding fire chief and mayor, respectively.
True, after 9/11 it is hard to watch a disaster movie happening in New York as reality unfortunately exceeded everything fiction script writers ever imagined.
Cheap melodrama, flat and bombastic characters, ridicule script lines a real person would never say, and everything is so predictible - you can always guess what happens or what will be said next.
A pretty good TV disaster movie.
I am sure everyone who has seen more then 2 disaster flicks could of wrote this movie.
All disaster movies follow the same formula and they never divert to a different path.
First part of the movie we meet the characters who lives are going to be in peril.
The middle part of the movie, is the disaster itself.
According the budget we will see if the movie has great affects or just a camera shaking some people up and cars overturning and scene of one or two insignificant buildings crumbling.
Sometimes the budget is so cheap they use scenes from other disaster movies.
One person, usually the kid or a women are trapped somewhere,And the last part of the movie is watching who lives or dies.
2 The black man, I find if there is a black character in these movies, they are either the potential bad person or another of the soon to be hero's sidekick.
3 A elderly person, we know nothing about them other then they are elderly and they are married or a dearly love relative of a major character.
Amongst the living are 1 The new lovers2 The star of the movie.
I am happy that I saw it in one sitting because I believe this had to be a 2 night movie when it first aired.
TV A-list stars like Charles Dutton and Jennifer Garner and Sharon Lawrence and Tom Skeritt and Cecily Tyson are in the movie they do a good enough job to keep it interesting.
It would be a shock, if, after a viewing, you had good things to say about this film.
Crossing paths with these folks are a Russian immigrant cab driver, the mayor's caring but aging mother, a poor teenager, and a businesswoman with eyes for Dori's husband.
It's as though someone said, let's have an earthquake strike Manhattan because having people trapped in a subway system would be cool.
Add on a fire chief who orders men into dangerous and avoidable situations, a mayor who can take time for a chat during a disaster, and a rock climbing mama who is the only one able to rescue her son and you have a film that goes way beyond credulity.
The special effects are uneven, sometimes being quite good, and at other times, totally laughable.
If you have a yen for disaster flicks, then you might take an interest in watching this one.
For, in truth, it is a double dose of dire, once as an earthquake flick, and once as an extremely poor-quality film..
You watch them do something, or react to something and you just have to sit in awe: There's just no way any sane person would do that, or waste THAT much time telling a story, or plain old goofing off, in an emergency.
This disaster drama created for TV is based on a novel by a popular New York TV anchorman-turned-author Chuck Scarborough.
A massive earthquake shakes 'The Big Apple' and the city is all but held hostage by the devastation.
New York City Mayor Bruce Lincoln(Charles S.
Dutton)and his political foe Fire Chief Thomas Ahearn(Tom Skerritt)come to grips putting their differences aside to work together digging the city out of the ruble.
There are some good special effects, but nothing we haven't seen before.
This earthquake flick is really no great shakes.
And not unlike other disaster movies there is vast and varied talent featured in the cast: Sharon Lawrence, Jennifer Garner, Fred Weller, Lisa Nicole Carson, Rachel Ticotin and Cicely Tyson..
Special effects are good, but there are just too many characters and situations.
AFTERSHOCK: EARTHQUAKE IN NEW YORK (1999) **1/2Starring: Tom Skerritt, Charles S.
Dutton, Sharon Lawrence, Cicely Tyson, Fred Weller, Jennifer Garner, Lisa Nicole Carson, and Rachel Ticotin Director: Mikael Salomon   Running time: Unknown   Not Rated (equivalent to a PG-13, containing disaster violence)By Blake French:(The following may contains a few minor spoilers)If I were to say that by the end of "Aftershock: Earthquake in New York" every problem in the picture will be solved, you would have no idea of how literal I was being.
The production has so many independent characters, complicated situations, and internal and external conflicts, by the halfway point of the movie, I lost track of whose who, and what's happening and where to what characters.
Most of the time it is a good thing to have a variety of characters, but "Aftershock: Earthquake in New York," pushes the audience over the edge."Aftershock: Earthquake in New York" details an earthquake that erupts in the big apple and the mayhem is causes for separate groups of devastated people.
Actually, this production would be more reasonably called "Aftermath: The Horrors of an Earthquake When it Erupts in a Big City" because it is more about the situations encountered after the quake than the existent tremor itself.
The movie does make us believe there is an earthquake is occurring.The film wastes time during the first fifty minutes, sparring us the usual momentum build-up and developing the characters individually, so that we can to care about them when the disaster hits.
There are just to many characters and complex sub-plots to weave this unorganized, fragmented movie together.
We meet Emily Lincoln (Cicely Tyson), a religious woman on her death bed while trying to teach a young, rebellious teenage boy lessons of life, Thomas Ahearn (Tom Skerritt), a family man having tiffs with the city mayor, Lincoln (Charles Dutton), who also has a family in danger.
Also covered in "Aftershock: Earthquake in New York" are marital problems, legal issues, family crisis, financial necessities, political outbursts, and even medical disasters, all which are related to each other, but distract us from the main events the story centers on.There are a few unconventional surprises contained in the story line, but for the most part, this is one long journey in circles.
After the earthquake hits, we expect the movie to build up tension for an aftershock, thus the title "Aftershock." But we just don't get that at all here, but receive a rehearse in an event that took place just an hour earlier.
The actual disaster itself couldn't help but recycling elements from past motion pictures such as "Volcano," "Asteroid," and "Daylight."The picture is directed by Mikael Salomon, whose previous work includes the also mediocre "Hard Rain" (1998) and " A Far Off Place" (1993).
In "Aftershock: Earthquake in New York" just about everything happens except someone answering the question of why there would be a major tremor in the big apple in the first place..
average made for TV disaster movie.
The mayor and the fire chief are having a big feud, but when an earthquake hits New york they put aside their differences and try to help their city.
All kinds of little stories are rolled in to this almost 3 hour made for TV movie.I must say I have seen this about 3 times, not sure why as I never cared much for it, but I keep watching it every few years for some odd reason.
It is very slow at times and it's predictable and the earthquake happens fast and the aftermath is most of the movies story.
I think great disaster movies need action and excitement all the way through in order to work.
Tom Skeritt, Charles Dutton, Jennifer Gardner, Cicely Tyson among others, Frederick Weller playing a Russian was the best acting job here.The movie is OK but just not anything you haven't seen before in these types of films.
Aftershock is less about the disaster and more about the people.
This is an unusual but very good twist to the typical TV disaster film.
Although the disaster itself, an Earthquake in this case, obviously plays an enormous part in the film the 3 hour movie really delves into many, many different characters, their lives, and their stories.
The film is a plethora of TV actors and one break through role by Jennifer Garner 2 years before she was CIA Agent Sydney Bristow.
I didn't even know she was in it until I saw her.It's tough to break down every role in this film because there is SOOO many.
Jennifer Garner definitely plays one of the lead characters as aspiring dancer Diane Agostini.
She's as cute as she usually is in her roles and comes across as a little childish at times but the role is boosted by the romance with Fred Weller who plays Russian cab driver turned knight in shining armor Nicholai Karvovsky.
Together Garner and Weller are terrific and make the most of the horrific situation around them helping each other out at every turn and revealing back story between them.
Tom Skerritt plays fire chief Thomas Ahearn who is ready to resign because of a personal argument with the Mayor of New York.
Sharon Lawrence plays over protective mother Dori Thorell who has an emotional back story involving a car accident that nearly crippled her son.
Lawrence does the best job hands down of really giving her character a story arc.
I found Lincoln most of the time to be kind of a blow hard but he still manages to take control of his city in crisis.
Although they set up a deep relationship between Dutton and his daughter played by Lisa Nicole Carson, it's one story that they kind of leave on the back burner.
There is just so many of them to keep track of and stories to follow it's a bit much at times.Director Mikael Salomon is certainly no stranger to film and no stranger to cinematography so the talent is there but perhaps the budget is a little low.
That being said there is some incredible special effects for a TV film and the Earthquake itself is quite terrifying.
The film is just a little bland perhaps being so long, and have so many characters.
It's less cheesy and better acted and presented than recent TV disaster flick Category 6.