Well. . . could have been worse. . .

[catscradle]

So I went ahead and saw The Day After Tomorrow. It was between that and Troy and I decided if I was going to get obnoxiously bad dialogue, I wanted mass global catastrophy to go with it.



Jesus. This was bad on a whole new scale of bad. It's so freaken bad it's fun. Though I was looking for something a bit more on the scale of Independence Day. As plotless as that was, we at least had Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum making wise cracks to go along with the special effects. This movie was all special effects and, sorry Dennis, you are no Jeff Goldblum. Did however get to see Will Smith in an extended preview for I, Robot, so I'll take what I can get.

Okay, a few notes. 1) You cannot simultaneous be up in a dinky news helicopter surrounded by six F5 tornados and be shouting that the people on the groud taking pictures are stupid. It's true that's not the brightest thing to do - but YOU'RE IN A DINKY NEWS HELICOPTER! Same for the reporter on the street.

2) The Russian wolves. No. Just no.

3) The science. We knew this would be bad. It starts off with this won't happen for 50-100 years. Then 6-8 months. Wait, no, that's 6-8 weeks. Did we say 6-8 weeks? We meant 6-8 minutes!

It was nice to see them use the actual terminal moraine boundaries after the ice age hit - though one wonders if they realized that glaciers carved those over a few thousand years. Ice sheets don't just appear, they slowly crawl.

4) Puke quote of the movie: "Mankind survived the last ice age. We will go on. Hopefully, mankind will learn from his mistakes. . ." I'm taking away points for use of non-inclusive language. Sheesh, you'd think this was the ice age or something. . .

Good things about the movie: Ian Holm. I'm not sure why he did the film, but his presence helped me. I'm grateful.

The six F5 tornados in LA rocked. As did the storm over New York.

Mexico closing it's borders to the US after the flood of refugees. Americans then attempt to enter Mexico illegally by crossing the Rio Grande - Okay, worth the price of admission. Good to see that the audience appreciated the humor of that.

Dick Cheney - boy, they didn't even try to hide that one, did they?

I think if you throw the plot out and all the characters, you could have done this film as a mockumentary and it would have worked better. I'm cool with complete pseudo science as long as it doesn't pretend to be actual science. But now I sort of want to read the Art Bell book this was based off of. For all his off the wall conspiracy theory rhetoric, I can't imagine he'd write a fiction book with dialogue this horrid.

All in all, there's no need for liberals or conservatives to get their panties in a bunch over this movie. It's special effects fun. That's it. You have to be a total crack addict who slept during sophmore biology to buy this as hard science.

Movie Tangent: If Toby McGuire and Elijah Wood had a baby, I think it would be Jake Gyllenhaal. More of Tobey's features, but something in Jake's eyes speaks Elijah's genes. I still maintain that The Ice Storm would have been SO much more interesting if those two ended up in bed together. I mean if you want to make a movie about sexual experimentation, go for the home run, I say.

Comments

[wiebke.livejournal.com]

I think if you throw the plot out and all the characters, you could have done this film as a mockumentary and it would have worked better.

More like Mars Attacks! you mean? LOL. Thanks for the quick review, I'll avoid letting anybody drag me to see it.