La Palma

A Norwegian family arrive for a holiday on The Island of La Palma, their visit coincides with worrying activity at the Volcano. Scientist, Marie predicts a disaster, but The Authorities refuse to take her warning seriously.

It's quite difficult to give this series a general score, I've settled on a six, and based it on averages, one and two are decent, three is good, unfortunately the forth episode is a shocker, it wasn't good.

Nicely acted, no issues with the acting, or the visuals, at times it looks very good, the third episode in particular looked fine, and some great location work as you'd expect.

I have mixed opinions about the family and their story, sometimes the dynamic was interesting, it became a bit silly in the woeful final episode.

Now, episode four, I can't review without commenting on it, absolutely ridiculous, almost nonsensical, at times it just felt daft, Day After tomorrow on steroids.

It's worth seeing, just don't expect to be wowed.

6/10.

The good part

Nice camera work, sfx and cgi; decent production, music and acting.

. .

The bad part

Some parts of the plot are forced and there is no real need for some of the characters. Parts of the dialogue are dumb and the way i see it, some of the actions and things the chatacters do, are not realistic at all.

. .

The sad part

You don't really know if this is a disaster movie, a coming of age story, a family drama or something else. Also it feels as if this miniseries had no director.

. .

Conclusion

Could of been a great 90 min flick instead of a 3h miniseries. There is no real loss if you skip this one.

. .

Seen on netflix.

Without trying to spoil the absolutely atrocious plot, there are amazing visuals in this series. The visual department might even win a price for their stunning work. They must have cried when they saw the entire show.

Fortunately it starts off extremely good, the first 70 minutes are absolutely engaging and with the looming catastrophe explained, there is no way anyone will stop watching. After 70 minutes they start to introduce the side plots and you will not believe what you are about to experience.

Here is my best guess, this was pitched as a 120 minutes movie but Netflix needed a limited series on a small budget and they forced the writers to extend the original plot by 90 minutes and they had only 17 minutes time before the shooting starts.

It is truly on the Level of "The Room" with slightly better acting. Decisions are made that triggered me to yell at my TV Screen because they completely disabled logic at some point and physics as well.

It turned into an unintentional comedy and that's just sad when you see the stunning visuals that accompany these idiotic characters on their way.

10 Points for the great CGI -6 Points for the writing.

It felt like the producers were so desperate to give it a good ending that they forgot what makes a good disaster themed series great. Some characters took dumb decisions yet didn't die at the end. Few characters got saved in a way which is not even realistically possible in situation like that. So a lot of questionable decisions they took at the climax which didn't go in the favor of the drama. I enjoyed the other episodes though. Skipped a few parts. VFX was stunning. But definitely a good one time watch. Good for the producers that they didnt drag it too much and ended with 4 episodes. That kept the screenplay as griping as possible for the viewers.

Don't start watching this series before sleep, because your blood pressure will shoot through the roof due to incredibly dumb characters.

Each of their actions is counter-intuitive and annoying as hell. The series drags on as non-interesting love/family drama with some mental health issues.

Special effects of tsunami and volcano are good, but their on-screen time is too short to make a difference or give you enough satisfaction after such an annoying family drama.

The problem is that you will want to binge it, in anticipation of a bloody tsunami, to get some satisfaction in the end.. so if you are going to watch it, start during the day. If you start in the evening, you will get pissed and disturb your sleep.

That said, I really hope Netflix continues doing apocalyptic/disaster pieces.. as there has been a lack of them in the past few years. But don't do it as series, with stupid drama fillers to drag it on! Just make a movie.

If this was a movie, it would have been much better.