Aftershock

Good movie/documentary. The beginning leads up to the moments before the catastrophe. The middle had my interest along with the findings of the dead, but the end where certain people talked about it a year later could have been a lot better. Did they rebuild? I don't know? Are they back to being a city again? I don't know? Just some unanswered questions at the end. It's still a great movie/documentary to watch. I would recommend it.

Considering this is a made for TV movie, the acting and sets were actually pretty good. Definitely a low budget film, but they play to their strengths and keep the sets small so the disaster scenes look credible. The few cgi tv news reels could have been better (i.e using real footage) but it didn't take up too much air time. The separate storylines were compelling and credible. The ending "1 year since quake" interviews could have been better.

I love disaster movies, I was raised on movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno and I am up to watch 2012 or Volcano anytime. A good disaster movie manages to dance the fine line between destruction and inspiration. This movie didn't dance that line very well in my opinion. The movie was well acted and the effects were decent, so that's why I gave it 4 stars, but I couldn't say that I actually liked the movie at all, I found it to be entirely too depressing. There were too many people who just died for no good reason. I fully understand that in a real disaster like this, many, many people would die for no good reason, but when you make a movie, you must always keep that line in mind.

This movie didn't come off as inspiring, or even warning, just depressing. Maybe it's a difference between American audiences and NZ audiences, but I don't imagine I'll ever watch this movie again, it was far, far too depressing.