O Dia em Que o Mundo Pegou Fogo

Everything in this movie is absolutely shocking. Ridiculous scenarios, stupid characters, mundane dialogue, if it's bad, this movie has it. But the funniest thing in this movie has to be the massive errors in geography. As has already been pointed out, no one in Sydney seems to have an Australian accent; they're all British, American or badly pseudo-Australian. One viewer pointed out that Australia doesn't have the death penalty; not quite true. You can still be executed for treason in Australia, but that's it; mass murderers spend the rest of their lives in prison. Also, the term "recitles" is never used in Australia to denote a musical or drama performance done by school kids (at least not in Adelaide, where I come from). This is an Amreican term that the American makers of this film clearly assumed would be used everywhere else in the world. However, there was another howler that had me in stitches. A section of the film is supposedly set in the Maldives. The Maldives lie no more than six metres above sea level, yet there are gigantic mountains covered in lush rain-forests. Obviously, no research went into these geographic aspects of the movie.

This "movie" was broad-casted last night on a french network. I couldn't believe my eyes how bad it was. There's absolutely nothing good about it. I mean nothing. Acting was zero, "science" completely stupid, backgrounds and CGI look like being painted by a 50's artist, and so on. I understand that even better artists need sometimes to pay big taxes so they have to play in second choice productions...But please ! Not in such a crap ! About location : Cape Town, South Africa, is perfectly recognizable in most exterior scenes (Table Mountain with Signal Hill on its right when looking from the sea; the business center of the city; even in some street scenes you can see typical buildings with Old Cape Dutch style; the license plates are definitely capetonians; on a house wall there is a plate claiming that the house is protected by Chubb Security Company; in one scene you can see a train, which is a Metro one, used in CPT,...etc.).

A "movie" to forget. There's nothing else to do with it.

Why, oh why, do I keep getting suckered by promotional trailers for DVDs? Anyway, if you have seen the promo trailers for this film, be warned: they are clearly concerning another film never made, brief clips of which showing up in this one for no discernible reason whatsoever.

The principle problem here is a script that thinks it's a remake of "The Day After" but which would fit just about any daytime soap-opera. Since the premise of the film derives from astro-physics, the finale - a typically empty 'happy ending', having absolutely no grounding in any science whatsoever - makes no sense whatsoever.

Although the film actually avoids religion, let's put the matter in religious terms for clarification: Imagine Judgment Day; and God is really pee-ed off and decides no one is worth saving. Suddenly, Peter Pan's Tinkerbell pops up and reminds God that if he really really believes, creation can be saved. God smiles down on a half-dozen soap-opera stars (no, they haven't repented, what's to repent?), and suddenly we're all back in Eden.... - Scientifically speaking, that's "Supernova".

What brilliant con-artist convinced anybody this film could be made? And who are the emotionally troubled people who would like this garbage? By the way, if you're wondering whether one could watch this turkey all the way through, the answer is no; after giving it some 20 minutes, sheer boredom demanded I started skipping scenes sequentially trying to find something interesting to watch. I didn't. But I did watch the whole of the finale to see if there was anything important I'd missed. There wasn't.

And there wouldn't be anything important missed if you skipped the whole film.

This movie is full of holes. It's the middle of the day in Sydney at the same time as the Sahara, India and what I presume to be Central America, when they're all meant to be in Australia they keep changing the side of the road that they're driving on, the number plates are not Australian (the cars either), half the street signs don't even exist here, waitresses in cafés don't wear uniforms (except at Starbucks), the only Australian accents are terrible, the desert scenes are definitely more like 14 than 4 hours drive from Sydney - everything about Australia in particular is just wrong! And that's because clearly none of it was shot in Australia. Oh and incidentally - we don't have the death penalty in Australia.

Extend that analysis to pretty much every other aspect of the movie and the only conclusion you can draw is that whoever wrote the script lives on a desert island without so much as an Internet connection. Even the Sun manages to explode on only one lateral plane (that which includes the orbit of Earth), and when the city's burning, the riot police waste their water on looters.

It's really difficult to tell what's going on where (and when) because of all these obvious inconsistencies. It wasn't until Luke Perry says "St Louis is half way around the other side of the world" that I really became convinced that they were meant to be in Australia. Couple all of that with a triumvirate of bad special effects, flat acting and a recycled doomsday premise and you've got a real stinker. A complete waste of time if you ask me.

Still, it wasn't as bad as The Perfect Storm.

Almost as funny as Robot Monster, or any of the magnificent Ed Wood Classics, but without the deep scientific grasp of those earlier films.

Read a dozen or so reviews -- the reviewers put a lot more into their posts than anyone connected with this incredible turkey -- I didn't see any review mention that our sun can't supernova, it isn't the right kind of star. It can nova, and its furthest expansion will reach the orbit of the inner planets, probably out to earth, but will not fill the whole solar system, as stated by one of the characters.

Great observation by one of the reviewers on how, after surviving in those Phoenix locations, the lucky few come to the surface and get to work on constructing a new sun. Excellent! And naturally in an actual nova there most certainly won't be anyone coming up, and probably no earth remaining to come up from -- but also no sun, and that wasn't comprehensible to anyone involved with this nonsense. No one in the whole project who knew any science at all, with tens of millions of dollars to burn -- pun definitely intended.

During the opening scenes I thought the story would involve the supernova of some distant giant star finally reaching our solar system seven million later. Silly me, that would have been far too stuck in boring reality.

The weirdest part is from start to finish I couldn't stand any of the characters. Can't say that about any of the Ed Wood masterpieces.