10.5 Apocalipsis

I pray this isn't the future of TV drama. I had to laugh at the opening scene where a guy on a bike manages to dodge every piece of falling debris, including the entire Seattle Tower. Maybe after that it turns into a decent suspense movie, I can't tell because the quick cuts and jerky in-and-out zooming is not only distracting me from what the characters are saying, it is physically making me nauseous and I have to turn it off. They don't pull off the attempt at the NYPD-Blue (maybe it was Kim Delaney's idea?) camcorder style. It's like watching Cribs on MTV, not one shot is long enough for you to see what is going on. It's just frustrating and annoying. This movie should be shown to film classes as an example of what NOT to do.

It was obvious in the opening credit sequence that "10.5" was going to be one doozy of a stinker. The cyclist outracing the collapsing Space Needle - how contrived, how ridiculous, how utterly physically impossible to ride a bicycle during an earthquake so tremendous.

This movie is so bad, it "MST's" itself!

There are so many gaps in logic, fact and production, it's impossible to keep up with them. Cheesy "effects" (that train was soooo obviously a model!), preposterous plot, lousy continuity and terrible timing (yeah, right - Science Chick and Doubting Guy DRIVE from LA to Redding and back in the same afternoon and, oh yeah, neither one of them gets dirty...). However, my absolute favorite gaffe in the movie comes in the first minutes of Part 2, in which a newscaster is detailing the arrival of troops in San Franciso. Across the bottom of the "news crawler" is the phrase "Marshal Law". What, did Marshal Faulk and Ty Law have a baby? When the military takes over local control, kids, it's called MARTIAL Law!! The fact that the editorial and production teams did not catch this simple error is, to me, indicative of their overall approach to this, ah, er, um, film. It seems painfully obvious that the entire company - actors, writers, gaffers, prop masters, everyone - have no respect for the movie they're making.

It is a great mystery how a bit of dreck such as this can get made, especially by network television, which is notoriously conservative. Rank this turd up there with "Atomic Train" and "Tidal Wave" - the only thing missing from "10.5" is an impassioned performance from Corbin Bernson.

A rank pile o' poo, but so much fun to watch! 1/2* out of *****

They had a preview screening of this for my office. I work with a bunch of seismologists, and the overall consensus was that when it came to the science, they got *everything* wrong. The room was full of people laughing uproariously at one howler after another. The special effects were pretty good, but the acting was kind of hard to take. Too melodramatic. And not just the science was wrong. The bit that kind of summed it up was a scene where a TV news report was showing a banner that the President had declared 'marshal law'. Don't the writers have a dictionary? Anyway, if you like bad disaster movies, this is entertaining. But it's pure fantasy, and not at all an accurate portrayal.

I have seen this movie once, but I just don't understand how any of the things that happen in the movie are physically possible, because they probably aren't. Let's see, there is a 7.9 Earthquake in Seattle, a man happens to be able to perform stunts while riding a bike down the streets and tries to out run the Space Needle and also manages to stay on his bike and ride it like there is no shaking at all. But this is only the beginning of the unrealistic stuff you see in the film. Later in Reading, California an 8.4 Earthquake occurs and a rift opens up into the ground and you also see a train. Now instead of having the hole open up and swallow the train right there, they decide to use a even funnier method and have it exactly parallel with the tracks then eventually have gravity pull the train in, also you might probably notice that the train is going the exact same speed as the earthquake to. Later in San Francisco a 9.2 Earthquake occurs causing the Golden Gate bride to collapse and what do you see, people standing up and running. If a 8.0 earthquake occurred in real life people would be immediately thrown from the ground. But the height of the unrealistic story plot is when the 10.5 earthquake hits, and practically destroys everything in California, but everything around the state is almost completely unharmed how do you explain this. Even tough they didn't do a good job with the realism it is kind of fun to watch and the science isn't as bad as the movie science in Core.

... so I'm being more than generous for the cinematography, sound, and special effects (they do give out Oscars for these after all) and raising it to 3/10, and still I'm feeling very generous given it is neither Christmas nor my birthday. I thought this thing had been embarrassingly and quietly buried by the networks a decade ago, and there it was today on a cable channel! That I actually pay for! This thing is a camp classic that seems to aspire to be something in the vein of "Independence Day", except this film does not have Will Smith and manages to make that 1996 film look like Citizen Kane in comparison.

A bunch of earthquakes strike up and down the west coast making Dr. Samantha Hill (Kim Delaney), "an intellectual earthquake expert" - do they actually give out such degrees and job titles? - believe that there is an even bigger earthquake coming. She manages to keep a straight face spouting lines like "These are not from our fault. They are from the faults affected by our fault." Hey this dialogue is somebody's fault! She predicts a "big one" will come and lop off a piece of the entire west coast UNLESS...they follow her cunning plan. Of course this involves nuclear warheads planted all along the west coast and therefore a massive migration away from the west coast for everybody. And we must have a tent hospital with lots of doctors out in the desert encampments being forced to make life and death decisions, acting like they have never had to do this before. Are these guys all podiatrists or something? But I digress.

This thing drags on for four hours so we need lots of interpersonal relationships that need healing, including a father/daughter pair that I didn't recognize until today. Hey, that's Kaley Cuoco as the daughter when she was only 17, three years before "Big Bang Theory", here in a film in the tradition of Irwin Allen, who ironically believed in the theory that any film with a big enough bang is worthwhile entertainment! Oh, and then there is Jeff Bridges as the president, who proves he still has that common touch by playing basketball with Fred Ward's character, who although he is the FEMA director, actually gets his hands dirty in the disaster. Oh well, at least he wasn't at some horse show at the time. See Hurricane Katrina and FEMA director Michael Brown for reference.

Well after four hours of sitting through this I will tell you that "the movie ends with a big explosion". It would have to, else there is really no payoff. I'm going to make you sit through the entire thing to learn anything more. If you must. Not recommended for anything but beer bong or drinking game enhanced laughter.