Your Thoughts Exactly

I know. You are saying to yourself, "Why would you go see this movie?" Here are a few reasons, none of which are good enough:
-Roland Emmerich, the director, made Independence Day, one of the greatest bad summer movies of all time.
-Roland Emmerich is also tabbed to direct the Dragonball Z movie, if it ever happens, so I got to keep up on him.
-Australian TV is just awful.

So I went, heavily medicated of course. No way I am seeing this movie sober. That made the experience somewhat bearable. But this is one awful movie. The special effects are nice...or are they? There are detailed sequences of a frozen over New York, and tornadoes attacking Los Angeles...but they didn't impress me that much. What's happened is I have seen too many movies relying on CGI, I can't be impressed now. How can you top Lord of the Rings or the first Matrix?
The population's eventual apathy for CGI is a good thing, because people will stop paying to see movies just for the effects. It would have been nice if Emmerich had cut a few of the CGI scenes and invested some money in a decent screenwriter. Emmerich wrote the script, and it is fucking awful. Every cheesy cliche is thrown in there, and the dialouge is TERRIBLE. With one notable expection: Emmerich has a knack for political commentary, and there is a cool rebellious, anti-U.S. side to this whole movie. The President (a George Bush look-a-like) always arrives late to any policy meetings, and asks the VP (a Dick Cheney look-a-like,) what to do before making any moves. Good stuff. But a few sly jokes don't make up for two hours of crap. The worst part was the apparent lack of common-sense editing by the director. We go from a scene of tornados destroying Los Angeles, to the presidential staff watching on tv, to the VP asking a question along the lines of "How bad is this weather?" IT JUST DESTROYED THE SECOND BIGGEST CITY IN YOUR COUNTRY. This happens all throughout the movie, its as if Emmerich couldn't come up with any other question that could possibly be asked.

The film stars Dennis Quaid, and I can't blame him or any of the other actors for poor performances since they have no material to work with. The sub-plot, in case you haven't notice from the ads, involves the world being plunged into an Ice Age in a matter of days. Quaid decides to trek from D.C. to NYC to save his trapped son. The son, played by Jake Gyllenhall or whatever, is in New York on a school honor competition trying to win a girl in his group, played by Emily something or other. Emily's smoking, so that gave me something to look at when the dialouge went to shit. I'll leave it open to you guys to find out whether he makes it in time.

One interesting side-bar, some C.S. dorks couldn't get past the fact in Independence Day that they crippled the aliens by uploading a virus into their computer program, which is totally preposterous. This leads me to believe that the weather scenario this movie is based around is also a crock. Still give Emmerich credit for pondering what such catastrophes would do to the world order, even if the scenarios are totally unrealistic. That said, I don't want him touching the DBZ movie.

So in the disaster movie genre (scary thought) this rates below Deep Impact, but slightly ahead of Armageddon.

Amount I should have paid to see this movie: -5 dollars