Magnitude 10.5

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.

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.

Taped it, since I had my doubts beforehand. Good thing too. Just zapping the ads out knocked about 45 minutes off the 4 hour run time. Fast forwarding through some of the drek knocked another hour off.

The science was retarded. If their stupid little idea of nukes would have had half a chance of doing what they said it was doing, it would have required hundreds of them, not 6, and they would have had to been thousands of feet under ground, not hundreds. I don't know why I should be bothered about that as it makes as much sense as arguing the "science" in Star Trek.

Phones that still worked when convenient to the "plot".

It had every cliche known to man and monkey. "Marshal Law" (Is that Jude Law's brother?)

I gave it a 2 instead of a 1 because the little bit of footage they had of things falling down was done pretty well.

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 *****

I have seen this movie once, but I just don't understand how any of the things that happen in the movie are physically possible, because they probably aren't. Let's see, there is a 7.9 Earthquake in Seattle, a man happens to be able to perform stunts while riding a bike down the streets and tries to out run the Space Needle and also manages to stay on his bike and ride it like there is no shaking at all. But this is only the beginning of the unrealistic stuff you see in the film. Later in Reading, California an 8.4 Earthquake occurs and a rift opens up into the ground and you also see a train. Now instead of having the hole open up and swallow the train right there, they decide to use a even funnier method and have it exactly parallel with the tracks then eventually have gravity pull the train in, also you might probably notice that the train is going the exact same speed as the earthquake to. Later in San Francisco a 9.2 Earthquake occurs causing the Golden Gate bride to collapse and what do you see, people standing up and running. If a 8.0 earthquake occurred in real life people would be immediately thrown from the ground. But the height of the unrealistic story plot is when the 10.5 earthquake hits, and practically destroys everything in California, but everything around the state is almost completely unharmed how do you explain this. Even tough they didn't do a good job with the realism it is kind of fun to watch and the science isn't as bad as the movie science in Core.