The Internet Movie Database Movie Reviews
Um…like, the whole middle of the Earth stops spinning and, like, everyone’s gonna die, dude.
Oh my god. Just when I thought explodos couldn’t get any more STOO-PID, along comes this dog. I saw it the day before Thanksgiving, and I swear, I blanked it out of my memory so thoroughly that it wasn’t til two weeks later that I remembered I had to write a review of it.
Don’t see it. That’s about as succinct as I can get. Don’t rent it, don’t watch it, don’t even be in the ROOM with it.
Yes, there are some good people in it: Stanley Tucci, Hilary Swank, Alfre Woodard, and the cute guy from Suspect Zero, Aaron Eckhart. Don’t let this fool you, you do not want to see it even if you really really like one or more of these people.
Not only is the premise and science talk in this even stupider, if possible, than The Day After Tomorrow, but it’s so mind-numbingly ludicrous that it’s very hard to watch this whole movie at once…I kept finding excuses to pause it:
- Mr. Otter just came home, gotta talk to him…
- Oh, I need something to drink…
- Look, here’s Wilson, I’ll pet him…
but eventually, I just had to finish the sucker.
Okay. Let’s just get it over with. The Reality Police are subbing as the Physics Police in this one, and you notice there are lots of them…we’ll need them.
IF the core of the earth stopped spinning, we’d have a lot more than just the loss of the magnetic field to deal with, the whole earth would stop spinning. No gravity. And of course the atmosphere would just quietly wander away, and we’d all be dead, and that’s that. (whoops, Spider Jerusalem just pointed out that MY dim physics memories are wrong, that wouldn’t happen. But the movie still sucked. Read on.)
And landing THE SPACE SHUTTLE in the LA RIVER SYSTEM? Although a cool bunch of special effects, that one had me howling, it was so completely unbelieveable.
And (by a process that is never explained) since the magnetic field is going away, this makes a hole in the ozone layer, which lets DEADLY MICROWAVES through to fry anything underneath them? I don’t think so. They just wanted cool special effects of burning and destruction on the Golden Gate Bridge and to destroy San Francisco, regardless of whether it made sense or not.
The kind of pressure there is under the earth (assuming they could really get there) and they’re wearing pressure suits that look like ski outfits? I really don’t think so…and they certainly wouldn’t be able to move around much…and if they have suits that can do that, why aren’t we colonizing the sea bottoms?
And of course the grammar police are there as well: in a key scene, the computer genius guy sends all the info on what happened (which the government has, of course, managed to keep secret even though the whole world is experiencing wierd disasters in various locations) to the world via the Internet, and a message pops up on his screen that the information is ‘on it’s way’…AAAAGGGHHHH!!! I think that was even worse for me than the stupid science, since I do assume some scriptwriter, at least, knows the rudiments of English grammar and punctuation…how can these people ever hold their heads up again???
Truthfully, I had so suppressed any memory of this awful movie that aside from the idiotic premise, I had forgotten all the things that pissed me off about it…they, and more, are very amusingly discussed on the Bad Astronomy web site, in Phil Plaitt’s review.
Anyway. Enough. Not worth the effort. Run away screaming from this dog, the good actors in it notwithstanding.
theotterlimits 