Anillo de fuego

Look, when an earthquake or tremor happens it's one thing, but looking at actors talking or walking through debris or on a street THE CAMERA IS TREMORING, it's IRRITATING!

Hey, What's the purpose of having vibration correction of it's shut off and the cameras INTENTIONALLY shaken for some stupid effect!

Try this at home-move your head around while staring at something in the foreground. What MOVES is the background behind the object and the object of your view only changes in perspective: instead of looking straight on at the subject you're at an angle, BUT in the whole process the PICTURE doesn't JERK!!!

WHY CANT THEY DEVISE A CAMERA THAT MOVES BACK AND FORTH A LITTLE, maybe an inch or five, WHILE LOCKED ONTO THE OBJECT OF THE PHOTOGRAPH! The background will move but the subject will stay in the camera's center... NO JERKING!!!

Utter crap, waste of time. The first episode was mildly bad, second one was horrible. The biggest complaint was camera work. I actually got a case of motion sickness from the overly active camera shaking. I think the camera operator had Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and had been given a near lethal dose of caffeine. I understand the idea behind it but damn it, come on, there is a thing as too much. And then of course there is the poor acting and terrible "science" behind the story line. Ring of fire left me burning and yearning for a barf bag. A few changes would have made a world of difference but it is was it is. A burning pile of yak squeeze that should never have seen the light of day. Or maybe I'm being mean due to several hours of my life taken from me trying to choke down this horrible excuse for entertainment.

I think this could have been a pretty OK program. Whoever made the decision to have so much of the camera work be on the shakiest hand held camera should be banned from the industry for life. I could have done better filming it with an old hand held movie camera without any image stabilization. It felt like they were doing it on purpose to add to the suspense. But instead all they did was make it nearly impossible for most people to watch without throwing up from motion sickness. I was interested in the story so I soldiered on, but I had to watch it with many long breaks over a number of days because of how bad the camera work was. One strange thing was that the only shots that weren't shaky were the CGI shots. Those were perfect. I guess they were too cheap to try to keep the Dramamine effect going during those (thank goodness). I probably would have given up on this after the first 20 minutes if Terry O' Quinn hadn't been in this. I won't say how it ended; only that I was glad when it was over so I could put away the Dramamine. If I had it to over again, I would have skipped this one just because of the really terrible camera work. These producers and camera people should be ashamed.

If there was a redeeming quality, it was Terry O'Quinn. He was great on LOST, and while his character is nowhere near as interesting he does do his best here and is quite commanding. The same cannot be said for the other actors who are all unbearably wooden and emotionless. When they don't act like they genuinely care or are living their characters' situations, at best they were indifferent, it is very difficult to be properly drawn in. Good characters and writing would have helped, but Ring of Fire manages to not even have those either. The characters are badly underwritten ciphers(for a three hour miniseries there was no excuse for this), the sort of stereotypes that we see all the time in movies featuring on the SyFy channel, and they are never more than that. The dialogue is clunky, overly-talky and dissolves too much into tedious melodrama and overlong exposition, it is often very over-familiar stuff that is made even more painful by awkward line delivery. There is very little to be invested in the story either. It was increasingly predictable(especially in the second half) and takes far too long to get going, two thirds of the first half is set-up exposition, and the excessive padding isn't enough to let go of the feeling that there wasn't enough story to sustain a three-hour running time. That there are too many sub-plots and none are particularly engaging is part of the problem as well. If it was done in half the time, with less dialogue, fewer subplots, more action and more attention to character, Ring of Fire would have been much more successful. Ring of Fire even looks as though it was made in a rush, with a unappealingly drab and grainy colour palette. There's been worse use of shaky cam, but it was distractingly over-used and the constant jerky movements are enough to make anybody seasick. There's also been worse CGI but that's not saying much, it's still dully rendered. Overall, a disaster in itself really. Terry O'Quinn is the least bad thing about it but even at the halfway mark I found myself begging for a fire extinguisher, the fact that I make it my business not to judge a movie/series without seeing the whole thing was the sole motivation for sticking with it. 2/10 Bethany Cox

The only real point I want to make in this is to say that the endless field of out-of-focus foreground objects in front of almost every shot is a pointless, annoying distraction.

The camera never stops gliding from side to side in a completely irrelevant manner.

If the 'technique' is an attempt to give a fly-on-the-wall immediacy it fails completely.

In spite of the bad technique, I did stick with it to the end of part one, and overall the storyline was interesting even if it was all very slow paced until the explosions started.

I am not sure I will bother watching part two.