The Aerie
Okay, I admit it, I watched "10.5".
Granted, I was working at the time. I was doing monthly invoices, an exercise in futility wherein I appeal to large soulless corporations to part with a miniscule fraction of their liquid cash in exchange for services already rendered. Futility must slow things down,because this month it took all day to get them finished.
Meanwhile I watched this abysmal movie.
All I can say is Wow. Wowwee-wow. Wow. I mean, this film is ambitious: it is clearly attempting to return to the Richard Chamberlain era of really horrid 1970's disaster movies. No detail was too small to suck: from the still satellite photos that showed moving dust clouds, to the so-called "special effects", to the computer generated actors, this movie was a black hole of quality.
In one exciting special effects blowout, a train is rolling down the tracks, "pursued" by a crack in the earth. Yes, pursued. The crack opens along the rail lines as they twist and turn, and stops immediately upon swallowing the train. The special effects were amazing: the scene where the train
was 'sucked' into the chasm looked so realistic, I thought there really WAS a model train being sucked into a fake-looking crack in a modelling table.
There were apparently actors in this movie, although they must have been standing behind the unconvincing, wooden refugees from the motels surrounding Hollywood. Or possibly the actors were off writing the script, since no trained writer set pen to paper on this project.
By the end of the first half, I was convinced - this movie really WAS as bad as some of the classic awful TV miniseries. Quite an achievement! And tonight, in the finale, a series of puny subterranean nuclear explosions will somehow prevent the studios that made this abomination from submerging beneath the Pacific.
For some reason this doesn't seem like a happy ending.