10.5

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.

This isn't really worthy of a serious review, being just the worst kind of TV movie dreck that it is possible to conjure. Anybody that rated this higher than a 5 needs professional help at once. Instead, here's what this movie will teach really dumb people (the ones who rated it 5+)...

1. The best way to avoid a collapsing building in an earthquake is to ride a BMX bike directly away from, but in the fall line of, the said building. You should also resist the temptation to avoid being crushed to a pulp by the simple expedient of turning down a side street as that would imply rational thought on your part (and we all know BMX'ers have no brains).

2. Earthquakes will form cracks in the ground that will chase a train exactly along the route of its tracks, even going around corners in order to follow the track exactly. Or maybe the track actually held the faultline together....

3. The above-mentioned cracks are so smart that, once they have succeeded in catching and engulfing the train, they will immediately stop opening up at once, literally the moment the engine goes down into the abyss.

4. Everyone in an earthquake will have to overcome some kind of personal /familial/professional problem.

5. An entire town can be swallowed without the slightest trace remaining.

6. A full-grown man will succumb to poisonous fumes far more quickly than a woman half (or less) his body mass.

7. The answer to stopping earthquakes is to detonate multiple nuclear warheads beneath the surface of the earth in the conceit that it will fuse a faultline together.

8. Disaster control centres have map displays that depict nuclear explosions as tiny, superimposed balls of fire. I kid you not...

9. The careers of Beau Bridges and Fred Ward are at an end. No! Wait! This bit is actually a fact. I wonder how galling it is to poor old Beau that his father and brother are/were much more successful than he is/was/will ever be.

10. After the big quake is over, people will shuffle mindlessly forward in an unintentional parody of Day of the Dead.

In fact, there really is only one thing to redeem this movie (at least in some tiny way) and that is the miniature and CGI effects of destruction. They are pretty obviously what they are - mini or CGI - but they are by far the most interesting thing in this otherwise diabolically awful excuse of a film.

Elsewise all the film contains (Apart from the already mentioned points above) is awful shaky-cam footage (it makes it look more realistic you know!), ironing-board acting, ludicrous science-abuse, characters so stereotypical and clichéd that you wonder if they were available "off-the-shelf", terribly over-the-top melodramatic music which is actually laughably awful in most scenes and let's not forget the Hulk-like split-imaging which at times makes the whole thing look like the opening credits of Dallas!

Oh my! This is a real stinker! Avoid this like it was a real earthquake! Unless you want a huge, huge laugh at the dumbness of it all.

Ouch. This was painful to watch. I am fascinated with humans trying to overcome potential disasters, i.e. Armageddon, Deep Impact and Twister. However, this disaster movie was a disaster. The guy riding from the space needle and the train getting engulfed by the fissure were ridiculous. I kept hoping there would be a change in plot that would make this better, but it kept getting worse. So much was just not believable. To me it was like watching most people on American Idol. It was so bad, it was fascinating. The other funny thing was nobody had a good relationship at the start of the movie. All the main characters that had relationships were having a rough go of it. Doesn't ANYONE have a good relationship anymore?

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 *****