I mean, insofar as disaster movies go.
First of all, it was really helped along by John Cusack, an actor I like very much. That alone brought it up from “ok” to “actually pretty good”.
Secondly, no one was really annoying. I’ve heard this phenomenon called “Twenty Minutes with Jerks,” where you start to watch a horror or disaster movie but first you get to hear about stupid people, to the point when the monster shows up you’re all just wishing they’d die.
The ex-wife plot is tired and trite and I wish they’d give it a rest, but I fast-forwarded past their moments of reconciliation and just watched the rest of it, so it wasn’t too bad.
Even the new husband was only annoying once or twice and most of the time he was OK. Too bad he had to die to fix the relationship.
And I felt sorry for the blond chick, but man, she almost got everyone killed over her stupid little doggie. Sorry, it’s a dog, and there’s like 8 humans who almost died because of you.
Not to mention them sneaking into the Ark at the end got a lot of people injured and maybe killed. At least they acknowledged it.
Ok, all that aside, I watched it for the scenes of destruction and I am happy to say they did not disappoint. Watching the entire Western seaboard literally tip over and fall into the Pacific was amazing. The earthquakes and the world falling apart, as well as the tsnuamis…
Some parts were actually pretty tear-jerking, and the director did a good job on macro and micro disasters and telling a story quickly. Like the old guy who called his son in Tokyo - it was pretty obvious they were estranged. Maybe because he married a Japanese girl? But it looked to me like the first time he had ever actually talked to his granddaughter. “Are you my grandpa?”
Nice to see an intelligent Indian with a family and a heart in the movie, not just comic relief or a nerd with no social life. Sorry that he had to die.
I liked the President a lot too.
I was siding with Carl Anhauser for at least some portions of the movie. No, doing it via money and status was not the right way. It should have been a lottery. But once they did it, they should have stuck by their plan. And they certainly couldn’t save everyone. It was very touching at the end that they let thousands of people onto the Ark, but I wonder, do they have enough resources to feed them all?
And of course Africa. Back to Africa. Nice touch, but when he said, “Africa probably never even got flooded”, did that mean all those people were still alive in Africa? Which means the fate of the human race isn’t as dire as we were led to believe. Also, nice as the thought is, that is going to be sheer chaos.
Also, if the landmasses have moved so much, how did Sasha (wow he was cute) manage to still put the plane down within driving distance of their destination?
But logic and rationale aside (at one point my SO came in to ask what exactly was happening; what the science was. You should have heard me. "Well, the sun is really heating up, and the neutrinos are no longer passing through matter but affecting it, and it’s causing the earth’s core to heat up rapidly…which is somehow causing the tectonic plates to break up and…um…)
Yeah. Logic and rationale aside (and length! what a long movie!) it was pretty darn good.