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Chad
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Posted: June 18, 2004 at 12:00am
Jack is a paleoclimatologist working for the government, which means he does all sorts of research and studies on weather patterns and such. Whilst working up in Antarctica, he watches a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island break free from the main formation, due to the Greenhouse Effect. Jack tries to warn people, but of course, nobody listens. This small (in comparison) chunk of ice ends up offsetting the entire climate of the earth, causing massive tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes, and even a devastating hailstorm.... but still, nobody seems to want to listen to ol' Jack. Meanwhile, Jack's son Sam was in New York for an academic challenge competition when allc this started, and is now trapped in a library due to the loads of ice and snow outside. Jack decides to hike across the country to rescue his boy.
This movie had every typical Hollywood cliché that you could imagine, wrapped up into one boring and predictable film. The "father who ignores his son, only to realize what he's been doing all these years, and realizes he needs to spend more time with him" story: check. Romance in the middle of a huge disaster? Covered. The person in power who ignores the warning, only to watch millions of people die as a result? Bingo. Ridiculously lame product placement? Indeed so ("we've lived for three days on M&M's!" ). The over-used "comic-relief person you'd never expect to be a help who ends up dropping some wicked knowledge that saves lives" = Got one here. Sadly, this is only a small percentage of the over-used storylines, there were countless more throughout.
Over on the storyline side of things, the trailers pretty much laid everything out for you. Man fucks with nature, things get fucked up, man pays for fucking with nature. This storyline actually could have worked out nicely, hence my viewing of the film; however, the way it's presented here is just all wrong. First off, I don't claim to be an expert on weather patterns and such, but even I can tell you that the way things happened here are just wrong. There's no way in hell that life in North America can be fine today, and all sorts of craziness going on tomorrow. Things felt too rushed throughout, and the preachiness of "save the environment" really got old by the quarter mark of the movie. The special effects were really the only selling point of this movie, but as seems to be the norm now-a-days, every scene was shown in the trailers. I kid you not, there is not one special-effect scene shown in the movie that I didn't already see in one of the two trailers that I downloaded a few weeks back. And even though the movie played out in typical Hollywood fashion, quite a few major scenes were spoiled due to the trailers giving away major plot-twists and events. Basically, the only things not covered in the trailers were the incredibly lame parts; suppose they wanted to get the movie-goers cash before releasing that information.
Over on the acting side of things, it's typical for this sort of movie. Dennis Quaid plays Jack, and does decent enough in his role when he's not hugely over-acting. Jake Gyllenhaal plays his son Sam, and does a great job of reminding me why I hated him before viewing Donnie Darko. How long can this guy get away with playing the 15-19 year old teenager? The rest of the cast wasn't much better, but these two cats are the ones who really spoiled things up in the lead roles. The last major problem with this movie was the running time. It clocks in at two hours and three minutes, when really, even with the hokey plot and lame twists, it could have been cut down to eighty minutes or so. The rest of the movie just feels like loads of fluff to pad things out a bit.
Overall, if you've seen the trailers, you've seen everything good about this movie. If not, go find said trailer and save two hundred minutes of your life. Nothing worth viewing here. 2/10.
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mebclowd09
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Posted: December 21, 2005 at 2:23am
i've watched this movie about 50 times already and it's one of those movies that i can just watch over and over and over again and NEVER get sick of. awesome!
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Dametria
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Posted: June 12, 2007 at 1:58am
Meh.....It was OK I suppose. It was just so....predictable. Watch the first 10 minutes and tell me whats going to happen and who you think is going to survive. Yeah, thats right. FX are good and I LOVE disaster films but nothing amazing happens here.
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Bliss From A Dead Embrace
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Posted: January 30, 2009 at 2:22am
I liked it. Wasn't anything special but it wasn't a waste of time. 7/10
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