10.0 Earthquake : Menace sur Los Angeles

Why and how do these kind of films ever get made? This one was not in the least suspenseful or exciting. It was ridiculously predictable and I knew in the first 10 minutes who would live, who would die, who was getting a divorce, would come together and after disaster hits, find their daughter walking down the road in the middle of the night in the Angeles National Forest and they would live happily ever after. Seriously Hollywood, disasters do NOT always have a happy ending, how about a disaster movie that is even somewhat close to reality? I miss the Irwin Allen disaster movies where you got to know and care about the characters and were shocked or delighted when they lived or died. There was no one to care about in this film and the only "10" about the film was simply the title.

Its one of these Syfy channel productions with a cheesy comedy disaster scenario and equally cheesy special effects.

There are a series of small earthquakes tearing apart Los Angeles. Two scientists believe that it is all building to a super-quake that will drop the entire city into a lava filled basin. They show this by hitting a hammer on a car windscreen and still having to rely on bad CGI effects for this demonstration to work.

An Engineer whose company is responsible for the quakes due to their fracking activities helps the scientists with a bizarre plan to somehow divert the epic enter to a less populated area of LA and save millions of lives.

The film starts of slowly enough as the fissures lead to people disappearing in various scenarios although we get an eyeful of some lovely ladies in bikinis. There is some nice location shots of various parts of LA as the film tries to set the scene.

However we just wait and wait for the 10.0 Earthquake and get teased with some fault lines here, the Capitol Building being wrecked there but its really a poorly written film with cheap effects and a crummy plot.

More disaster trash from the SyFy Channel, made with even less originality than before. 10.0 EARTHQUAKE is your bog-standard earthquake movie in which America finds itself assailed by a series of continuous earthquakes, the sole result of which seems to be creating CGI cracks in the ground and causing bad actors to run around and scream a lot.

This routinely dull film follows exactly the same template as many a SyFy movie, including an inordinate amount of time spent on characters driving around in cars. Quite why you're supposed to care about a car full of bratty teenagers, even if they are the offspring of the main characters, I don't know. The film lumbers from one clumsy set piece to the next while the script regurgitates old pseudo-science and the viewer struggles to stay awake. Disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones is the only familiar face they got to appear in this film, which says something.

When it comes to movies, there are certain grades I put things under. There's "Must see in Theaters," "Can wait for streaming," and "Possibly will play on a certain station soon." This one ranked below all of them. Sure, it could be argued that it was about the perceived dangers of fracking, but the writers clearly did no research about it, except, maybe, to look it up on Wikipedia. Sure, if there are "statements" made in movies, I can usually watch with mild interest and try and figure out what they're saying, but this was just ridiculous. We kept waiting for the big, promised finale, but it failed on this and many other levels. DNW. Do NOT Watch.

Only watch this if you need a mindless movie playing in the background while you're busy doing something else. Very predictable plot, mediocre acting and direction, sub par special effects, choppy editing, etc. I gave it a 3 because it fits the bill if you're looking for a very mindless movie. You don't even have to watch it to know what happens.