I’ll second the sunroof escape, I said to my wife he should do that while whiny-bitch refused to move.
Here’s the one that pissed me off. I mentioned in another thread about bad movie lines Pullman’s line in Independance Day where he’s on the plane and the “people didn’t have to die” speech.
This was when, near the beginning, Bridges is talking about the Washington governor. He’s asking about how the gov is handling it personally and then says something along the lines of, “He shouldn’t have to go through this alone, the country will help him out.”
No shit! And here I thought FEMA meant Federal Endowment of Masturbating Assholes!! You mean we have a federal agency to aid states in massive disasters?
Ok, having been sucked into Buffy, I spent a lot of time yesterday working my way through parts of Season 2 that I borrowed from a friend. And I forgot about 10.5
But, about 10:30 I finished one episode and didn’t want to begin another, and I realized with horror that I’d missed most of it - I came in just as the female governor person was speaking and then had the moment with how her family is missing and all that.
I then had a moment of relief that I hadn’t watched much more than that when I realized how bad it really was. The camera stuff likely would have given me a killer headache if I’d tried to watch it straight through.
But I may watch parts of it tonight, in hopes of seeing major destruction.
Not only did the camera work seem like 24, the whiny asthmatic daughter even looks a little bit like Kim Bauer. I can’t wait for the mountain lion scene…
I knew this movie was going to be faking it when I saw only eight or nine cast members listed in the credits. The result? Tight shots and a lot of camera-shaking.
Could the writers have made every cast member’s personal life a little more of a living hell? I think they dragged out the Big Bag o’ Cliches for this one.
But I’m still watching it. I’m a sucker for special effects- the good ones awe me, the bad ones get ridicule.
But she can’t, Hal Briston – the moment she first opened her mouth, daughter whiterabbit said, “She’ll lose the attitude and her parents will get together again!” Big Bag o’ Cliches indeed!
They stole Kim Delaney’s character (do any of these characters have names? Do we know what they are? Do we care?) straight from what’s-her-name the spunky engineer in “The Abyss.” Much easier than writing a new one, I guess.
Yep, that’s the exact reason I watched it and will watch tonight’s conclusion. Oh, and to see California fall into the ocean. You know, if that really does happen, I’ll have beach front property again! (I live in Phoenix.)
Well…can’t we have her ever-so-tragic death at such a young age be the catalyst for bringing her parents back together? Please?
Yeah, I know, that kind of situation is more likely to drive them even further apart. But hey, with all the logic inconsistencies in this flick, their daughter’s death could just as easily make the parents get back together and join a travelling circus.
My name is av8rmike, and I’m a sucker for disaster movies. Volcano is still one of my favorites. There was a similar earthquake movie about 10 years ago, I think it was called “The Big One.” Ring any bells?
I know I learned a lot from watching this. I didn’t know that the Space Needle could withstand a 9.1 earthquake, but will collapse in a 8.4 or whatever. Or that it’s possible to outrun its collapse on a bike. I learned that earthquakes will follow train tracks, but cannot outrun trains.
The 24 style of direction really got tiresome. Were they directed by the same people?
Earthquake magnitudes? I thought they were yelling out warp speed factors, like Mr. Sulu!
That would be nice, but really, are they gonna kill a teenager (who, being fictional, richly deserves it) when they can have the sappy happy family ending instead? They might have to try to tap into REAL emotion if they kill her off. I’m still voting for she-loses-the-attitude-and-her-parents-get-back-together.
I think what gets me about this is that I think if they had TRIED they could have done this pretty well, but they didn’t even try enough to get to half-assed let alone mediocre or…gasp!..good. (Given some actual research, I bet they could have even made the quakes seem at least plausible enough that I wouldn’t be screaming at the TV about how wrong they are. A minor point – have these people responsible for this never been IN a quake? Don’t the writers live in LA? You can’t even STAND UP if they’re really big. Morons.)
Yet, I must watch the rest tonight. I have to make sure all my predictions are correct. sigh
When I saw the first commercial for 10.5 I was hoping to hear the Tool song Ænema in the background music. Damn network TV. It would have fit perfectly!
Where oh where does one begin the autopsy? Bad science, bad acting, bad writing.
If any seismologists are out there, I’d like to know:
Can you get real-time Richter scale numbers as an earthquake is in progress? I always assumed it took a little interpretation of readings from several locations and it took a little time (hours?)
Can you get real-time epicenter locations on a computer? Again, I thought that would take a little time to figure out.
IF a fissure opened up in the ground, what would be the approximate speed of the opening? Never mind that it followed the train tracks around corners and the special effects were of 1950s quality, but would it actually travel along the ground at just over the speed of a passenger train? This whole sequence had a Wile E. Coyote feel to it.
Of course, like all computers in the movies, any display on the monitors is accompanied by beeps and boops.
The Space Needle collapse was interesting. Not only was it concrete instead of steel, but for some reason the legs developed longitudinal cracks as the collapse began. Nothing I would expect in a million years in a compression member. Such a tall structure is not going to swing down like a pendulum. The vertical members would fail long before that. The Golden Gate collapse looked a lot like the “Galloping Gertie” bridge in Tacoma that failed due to wind- not at all how I’d expect Golden Gate to come down.
The car in the quicksand was rather amusing. Of course, it sank only to a depth where John Schnieder could get out the sunroof. I thought he was going to call Uncle Jessie on the CB and get Cooter to pull him out.
Still, I’ll be watching tonight. This is one of those rare movies that is so bad that you can’t help but watch.
I can imagine the writing team working on this one:
Writer1: OK, it starts with all these people who are wound way too tight.
Writer2: Don’t keep me in suspense! What happens next?
Writer1: Dunno. Disaster or something.
Writer2: That sounds great! Let’s write this down! Anyone seen my crayon?
And I’m surprised no one mentioned the scene where the bitchy wife was talking to her surgeon husband on the phone. She mentions the earthquake some 1200 miles away. He says “There was an earthquake?” She replies “That’s the problem with you. You’re so wrapped up in your own little world.”
At that point my girlfriend and I shouted, spontaneously and yet in unison, “He. Was. In. SURGERY!!!”
Oh, and another thing – anyone remember when Beau Bridges and Fred Ward could act? Anyone esle reminded of Todd Bridges and Fred Flintstone?
Oh and yet another thing – maybe I got this all wrong, but where was Kim Delany? Somewhere North of SanFran, right? She had to be, because the chopper took her to an SUV that was obviously sitting out in a field somewhere. And where was the President? I think it was specifically mentioned that he was in DC at the time. In fact, they showed him in the Oval Office.
A couple of years ago, John Schnieder played more or less the exact same character in the exact same situation in a TV movie about tornados. He’s in a bit of a rut.
Oh man… the best part about this movie is the wisecracks in this thread.
(Some of this is C&Ped from my LiveJournal, where I was doing a running commentary because I was watching alone.)
Y’know, for a lot of this movie, even using the clichés for comic effect because of their chiché-edness is cliché. Hrm, long, skinny thing falling directly at me. move ten feet to the side? Nah, stay directly in the path for as long as possible.
Wonder if the director’s ever seen 24? Between the spilt-screens and the close-ups of the Ford logo, and the CA governor’s Kim Bauer daughter and the camera work and the nuclear bombs detonating in CA, I keep thinking everything’s supposed to be in real time.
Upon Kim Bauer and Asshole Dad approaching Browning (the town that got swallowed)… “There are birds! And they’re FLYING! *WHAT’S GOING ON?!”
I also loved the Acme Train-Swallowing Quake. “Will swallow the Amtrak passing behind your house, but leaves your flower garden next to the track unscathed!”
At the very least, I was looking forward to SF biting it, and not even that was very cool. I would’ve liked to see the Pyramid and Coit Tower go down. And the Sutro Tower, which most people think is gonna fall down just for the hell of it. Then again, all we saw in Seattle was the Space Needle.
I may have to watch again just to get the jokes in this thread.
Somebody in the know actually opened a thread on this exact subject a week or so ago, based just on what he’d heard about 10.5. And you’re right, they way they showed it was total crap. :eek:
They have to triangulate data from several monitoring stations, which takes hours, and even then, it’s basically a rough estimate.
By the way, I loved how they depicted “geologist” as somewhere between “emergency room surgeon” and “nuclear missle submarine commander” on the stress scale. That was the most tension-filled geology lab EVER!
