Nature Unleashed: Earthquake

If I did not know better, I'd have thought Ed Wood did this movie. It has its pros and cons. The story isn't bad. The setup is perfect if you're a disaster movie junkie, but does fall short of any Irwin Allen classic. The cons are the acting, the acting, and the acting.

I was surprised to note that the film was released in 2004; it has a very "1960's" European feel in look and soundtrack. None of the supposedly US characters looks or sounds American; the hairstyles and clothes, again, are very retro and much of the dialog appears to have been looped--without the appropriate background noise! None of this would matter if the conflicts or characters were involving--but the action is very formulaic and the acting poor.It certainly is difficult to come up with new approaches to disaster-type scenarios on limited budgets, but "China Syndrome" and countless earthquake films have already been done. As the Bible--and Spielberg in his Oscar acceptance speech--said: "In the beginning was the word..." With or without a significant budget, there first needs to be decent script, and this one just doesn't work. If the creators of Mystery Theater 3000 were still doing their magic, this film would be a perfect candidate for parody.

Ho-Dee-Ho, what should I have expected? I bought this TV drama on DVD for under 5 dollars so could I be disappointed, really? No, I wasn't and I'm afraid the standard low brow for midget minds situational disaster flick formula is in force here.

A family with teenage kids. The daughter looks like a slut, but so what? An improbable situation, a divorced American family in Russia, where Dad is an engineer, but his wife appears to have most of the smarts.

What can be said formula take over. Family divorced, and kids think Mom was a douche bag for divorcing Pop. We never learn why they were divorced or why the kids and ex are in Russia to begin with.

No matter an earthquake strikes where golly, you would think, the Russians would think maybe it wouldn't. Dumb Russies.

The rest is pablum for a 90 minute occasional glance at the screen to be sure your movie smeller didn't predict way ahead how it would end.

The brave young and arrogant 17 year old heart throb, the Artie- terribly trashy looking daughter, the very smart Mom who immediately sees a circuit board needs resistors bypassed with her cast off wedding ring.

Oh, well, you'll find this flick plays well and probably isn't a total disaster if you buy the DVD for under 3 dollars. I want a partial refund on what I paid.

Josh (Fintan McKeown) lives in a Russian city where a nuclear plant is present. In fact, he is an engineer at the facility while his ex-wife is a scientist there as well. Josh made plenty of mistakes as a husband and dad and, therefore, lives separately from his ex and two teenage kids. The two children have issues as well, for the son longs for a motorcycle, which his mother forbids, and the daughter is rebellious, too. One day, all Hades breaks loose, as an earthquake hits the region. The teenage girl, who skipped school, ends up on damaged bus, unable to leave a wounded teacher from her school. Most importantly, the nuclear plant is severely hurt, losing its precious cooling water supply. A meltdown may occur but Josh and the other plant operators are temporarily stymied about how to prevent the worst case scenario. In addition, the couple is worried about their missing children! Will a solution be found in time and the family reunited? This isn't the worst disaster flick of all time but its not great, either. None of the actors are well known and the script is cliché ridden, even down to an evil, conniving plant employee. But, for all that, it is still watchable, intriguing enough to entice its audience to stay with it until the resolution is known. So, if you are a fan of disaster and survival type movies, you might give it a go.

Well, sure, I was lured in to watching the 2005 natural disaster movie "Nature Unleashed: Earthquake" here in 2021. And it was because of the movie's cover, it being a natural disaster movie, and also because it was movie that I hadn't already seen, that I sat down to watch this 2005 movie from writer Andy Hurst and director Tibor Takács.

And there shall be no doubt about this when I say that "Nature Unleashed: Earthquake" was by no means a great movie. In fact, the movie's cover was actually the best part about the entire feature. Sad as that may be.

Yeah, the storyline was pretty generic, even for a natural disaster movie. So there wasn't much of any overly interesting entertainment factors to be had here. The whole movie was as predictable as it was generic.

It should be said, though, that some of the scenes with the disaster wrecked by the earthquake tremors weren't actually all that bad. But then on the other hand there were scenes of the same kind that was just downright laughable and painful to witness. Most of the scenes during the quakes just didn't have enough sense of chaos and destruction to it, which ultimately lead to some rather unconvincing scenes, which made the movie suffer terribly. Especially since a natural disaster movie needs to have impact, impressive CGI scenes and lots of edge-of-the-seat moments to capture the audience. That just wasn't present in the 2005 movie "Nature Unleashed: Earthquake".

And it didn't really help much that the characters in the movie were written as generic, wooden and rigid, most of which you don't even really care about one ounce.

All in all, then "Nature Unleashed: Earthquake" was a rather forgettable movie and a very stale experience for a natural disaster movie. I would actually recommend that you don't waste your time, money or effort on this 2005 movie, because it really wasn't worth it.

My rating of "Nature Unleashed: Earthquake" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.