Magma: Volcanic Disaster

You know the flaw with disaster films? It's not a foe that can be fought. Each follows the same formula, run away, talk, run away, talk, run away, then a finale that essentially involves the disaster simply ending or some ridiculous pseudoscience.

Ontop of that every such movie needs a scientist who relays his/her fears regarding the forthcoming disaster to the government and gets ignored.

Magma: Volcanic Disaster is exactly what you'd expect for a movie of it's sort. Scyfy original with poor sfx, generic writing and absolutely no originality at all.

Credit where credit is due the movie doesn't have the worst cast but there isn't much they could do to raise this paint by numbers affair above the mediocre.

The Good:

Amy Jo "Pink Power Ranger" Johnson

Xander "So very tired veteran" Berkeley

The Bad:

SFX

Lack of originality

The movie does not start well. The writing, acting and sound are all about as bad as it gets, suggesting the entire movie may end up being a disaster. Not true. But the long-dormant Iceland volcano with an unpronounceable name starting with "Troll" does erupt suddenly and quickly, with terrible consequences for the people we didn't likely enjoy watching.

This is on the level of a TV-movie, but not as much of a disaster as some disaster movies. The actors playing Peter and Bree are actually pretty good, once Bree is no longer perky (or perhaps you can count her perky behavior as good acting). Bree is too perky and enthusiastic to be believable as an intelligent scientist, but that will change later.

The writing is about on the same level as the typical movie of this type, but the last half-hour or so is quite exciting. Some actors with only a few lines seem like they are sitting around the table reading their lines for the first time.

The President of the United States is no Kiefer Sutherland, but he does a good job.

The visual effects are competently done but not spectacular. In most scenes we see only the minimum necessary to communicate what is happening, but toward the end we get a little more detail. Violence is not graphic (unless you count people catching on fire, but even then you can't really see anything) but several people surely die. In one case we are told the person died.

This isn't bad enough to be good, but it's good enough not to be bad.

Well, this isn't the worst Sci-Fi Channel Original Production that I've seen, but it may just be the most boring. We start with a college professor and a few students going to explore a volcano in Iceland. Of course the volcano erupts, and they barely escape with their lives. Turns out the professor knows some genius who has worked out a theory of how all the world's volcanoes will start erupting, and we see the scenario played out via the usual cheap looking computer generated special effects. Loads and loads of cheap looking computer generated effects. Toss in the stupendously clichéd government bureaucrats who don't take the threat seriously, some utter nonsense about how humans have caused the Earth's core to expand, and a breathtakingly dull subplot concerning the professor's ex wife, and that about wraps it up. Oh wait, I almost forgot the environmentalist speech at the end, where we're supposed to learn from our mistakes...and some other stuff. Sorry, I'm afraid I nodded off there for a minute. I'm sleepy after sitting through this thing.

Overall, you've got a pile of characters we couldn't care less about, a plot that's identical to a dozen other really crappy disaster movies, a script that sometimes sounds as if it was written by someone who wasn't a native English speaker, and there you have it.

These film makers really need to hire a consultant to at least give them enough technical insight into their subject matter so that it doesn't make the average layman laugh at the absurdity of it.

Edit: Kind of funny, I apparently wrote this review on January 26, and here it is February 6, and I can't remember ever having seen this movie.

The movie was fine, a little cheesy, a little predictable. The special effects were like in any disaster movie I've seen - kind of fake and hard to believe (I'm not sure whether this was a budget issue or maybe that's what things would really look like and viewers are generally looking for something more real than real). Nevertheless, it was refreshing to watch. It had an underlying moral, and some pretty cool things happened. What I can say for sure is, that the main actors did a fantastic job with what they were given. If you are considering watching this because you're a fan of Xander Berkeley, Reiko Aylesworth, or another actor with a bigger role in it, you will not be disappointed. By the way, it was shot in Bulgaria, so the scenery is lovely as well.

This seemed like a typical Sci-Fi channel disaster movie that would be 4 hours over two nights. I didn't believe the TV Guide listing. But in the last 5-10 minutes, it wrapped up everything at warp speed. The end had more senseless death than I imagined. It was like a bad episode of '24' or like 'Atomic Train'. The only reason I completed watching was for two of my favorite beautiful actresses, Reiko Aylesworth ('24') and Amy Jo Johnson ('Power Rangers', 'Felicity'). Not bad clap-trap for a Friday night of nothing to do, but don't go out of your way for it. I am usually up for a good made-for-TV disaster, but this did not satisfy my excitement for world destruction. But then again, it was better than '10.5'. Test patterns are better than '10.5'.