Every time something big and bad happens to a road, bridge, landscape, it is clearly visible that the cars are toys, the bridge is plywood and the landscape is a small patch of dirty ground behind the parking lot of the studio. A roaring see looks like a shaking bathtub. A part of California becomes an island at he end and the rift that tears the ground open looks like the graphics by a secondary school nerd.
Several reviews talk about a tsunami and the disappearance of California. I've seen no tsunami. And by the way, just a small part disappears, most of California remains, as a big island.
The characters are weird. The president is a good and smart guy who really knows what he has to do and immediately does the right thing. Male political / scientific macho's start listening to a Jody Foster-in-Contact-like woman who has weird theories, that wonderfully turn out to be true. Where the viewer would expect panic, everybody is rather calm. Where panic is completely useless, people panic in a stupid way (you really see them thinking "did I have to run this way or that way, and hey, the camera, oh my, don't look into the camera"). People are dying and are able to say the necessary last words to console relatives, and of course die instantly, right after the last word. Advisors to the president contradict themselves every other 10 minutes, and at the end it is just "yes mister president". Stereotypes everywhere. Disney-happy families. Even the girl in full puberty who does hardly anything more than screaming, moping and being negative is happy with her daddy in the end.
The wonderful female researcher has to go to the place where the next earthquake should be, or to a place where underground faults might prove her theories. She's going on survey missions that normally take weeks, but here just take a couple of hours, and she always finds what she needs to prove her theories, even though she has to run for poisonous fumes coming up from deep underground and of course she survives.
People find their lost ones, who could be in any refugee camp, but of course the lost ones are in the same camp, or in the first camp that is being searched.
FEMA is a well-oiled, effective, efficient, quick-acting and compassionate organisation, that has trained all possible scenarios. It's a bit hectic, but they really have learned their lesson after New Orleans! Wow.
At the end of the film, a solution is found. Let's use nuclear bombs to fuse the underground fault. No way it will do any damage. Nukes will fix the problem. We are wrong when we think that it will rip California from the mainland... nooooo..... 5 nukes will do the trick. But the fifth one doesn't work OK. Still, maybe it's enough. But it isn't. It really should have been 5. California drifts off and becomes an island. And people survive!
Other reviews mention the real-time display of the Richter scale earthquake force. It's going from 4,6 to 4,7, the display says so, while the earth still shakes... so it must be true. And at one point, an earthquake is even "stabilizing", yeah really, I guess at that point they had their script writer replaced by Calvin (maybe even Hobbes was writing too).
I had a few good laughs. Not at the moments that the producers expected me to, though...
Bad movie. Bad, bad movie. Stupid movie. Barf!
Several reviews talk about a tsunami and the disappearance of California. I've seen no tsunami. And by the way, just a small part disappears, most of California remains, as a big island.
The characters are weird. The president is a good and smart guy who really knows what he has to do and immediately does the right thing. Male political / scientific macho's start listening to a Jody Foster-in-Contact-like woman who has weird theories, that wonderfully turn out to be true. Where the viewer would expect panic, everybody is rather calm. Where panic is completely useless, people panic in a stupid way (you really see them thinking "did I have to run this way or that way, and hey, the camera, oh my, don't look into the camera"). People are dying and are able to say the necessary last words to console relatives, and of course die instantly, right after the last word. Advisors to the president contradict themselves every other 10 minutes, and at the end it is just "yes mister president". Stereotypes everywhere. Disney-happy families. Even the girl in full puberty who does hardly anything more than screaming, moping and being negative is happy with her daddy in the end.
The wonderful female researcher has to go to the place where the next earthquake should be, or to a place where underground faults might prove her theories. She's going on survey missions that normally take weeks, but here just take a couple of hours, and she always finds what she needs to prove her theories, even though she has to run for poisonous fumes coming up from deep underground and of course she survives.
People find their lost ones, who could be in any refugee camp, but of course the lost ones are in the same camp, or in the first camp that is being searched.
FEMA is a well-oiled, effective, efficient, quick-acting and compassionate organisation, that has trained all possible scenarios. It's a bit hectic, but they really have learned their lesson after New Orleans! Wow.
At the end of the film, a solution is found. Let's use nuclear bombs to fuse the underground fault. No way it will do any damage. Nukes will fix the problem. We are wrong when we think that it will rip California from the mainland... nooooo..... 5 nukes will do the trick. But the fifth one doesn't work OK. Still, maybe it's enough. But it isn't. It really should have been 5. California drifts off and becomes an island. And people survive!
Other reviews mention the real-time display of the Richter scale earthquake force. It's going from 4,6 to 4,7, the display says so, while the earth still shakes... so it must be true. And at one point, an earthquake is even "stabilizing", yeah really, I guess at that point they had their script writer replaced by Calvin (maybe even Hobbes was writing too).
I had a few good laughs. Not at the moments that the producers expected me to, though...
Bad movie. Bad, bad movie. Stupid movie. Barf!