I’m a complete sucker for disaster movies so I’m going to be there opening weekend. Fox showed a 10 minute preview last night and it looks like a good summer movie. The trailer gives me chills with the birds flying South over Manhattan and the barge in the middle of NYC.
The cast looks pretty good with Dennis Quaid, Sela Ward, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Ian Holm. Granted, this movie is brought to us by the master of suckdom who brought us the masterpieces of “Godzilla” and “Independence Day”. But any movie that gets people freaked out about environmental issues is a good movie if it helps enact change IMHO. I’ve heard that NASA sent out a memo to its employees asking them to refrain from commenting on the movie’s real world implications.
No desire to see Manhattan reduced to rubble. Been there. Done that.
But he’s just so adorable when he stamps his little feet!
Anyway, it seems like an interesting idea, and the first previews I saw gave me goosebumps, but for some reason I’m getting bad flashbacks of The Core. If I’m looking for something to do on a Saturday afternoon, I may go check it out. Otherwise, I think I’ll wait for the video release.
Btw, the posters here mostly show shots of an ice-locked Tokyo Tower. What are they using in other markets?
It looks pretty bad to me. I hope The Bad Astronomer takes it on.
I watched a bit of the preview, but then decided it was giving away too much and I was going to see it in the movies anyway so I stopped watching.
I will say that the scene on the ice shelf that they led off with was really, really crappy, but at least it was short.
I thought it looked better than the Earthquake disaster (the movie more than the film). Apparently, there is no friggin’ constant shakey camera or other pretentious techniques. I wish they’d use the West Wing people to do these TV movies.
I’m usually pretty successful in suspending disbelief for these type of flicks, so it looks pretty fun to me. But, I’m one of the 12 people on Earth who liked their ‘Godzilla’, so my tastes diverge from the mainstream, I guess.
I’ll pass on this one. Bad premise, bad science, bad director. The new Marx Brothers box set is out, so I think I’ll spend the weekend watching that instead. 
Here it’s an ice-rimed statue of Liberty, just the head and torch-holding arm.
DD
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know what the actual plot of the movie is? I’m expecting that the destruction scenes are going to be finished off in the first half, and the rest of the film is going to be a survival movie, but is there more to it, or is it really going to be that simple?
I really think it’s gonna be that simple. Oh, and in addition to New York becoming a glacier overnight ( :rolleyes: ), apparently wolves also spontaneously spawn out of ice.
Count me out, my mind will only permit me to suspend disbelief to a certain extent before it would shut down in protest.
I watched it in growing disbelief. If they had set out to drive people away from the theaters they couldn’t have done a better job unless they had signed Kevin Costner for the lead.
Special effects are not interesting. People are interesting. Even in summer blockbuster movies, likable characters, snappy dialog, and a sense of humanity are the most important features. (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Men in Black, Pirates of the Caribbean, for a few over the years.)
As Shakespeare said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the CGI technicians.”
I hope it’s a good movie, because parts of it were filmed here in El Paso, and we’ve really been trying to attract more studios out here. My brother was an extra in a couple of crowd scenes. And the “International Bridge” that you see in the trailer (with “MEXICO” in large letters) is actually an overpass that I can almost see sitting here at my desk. There’s a private school a couple of blocks from my office that was turned into an embassy for the filming. Plus, we got to watch a scene being shot on the roof of that same building. Have no idea who it was being filmed, but I stood at my office door and watched the cameras roll. No big deal to some folks out there, but it was a new experience for me.
So what actually happens in the movie? What is it, a meteor? Earthquake? Global warming? Plagues of telemarketers?
Global Superstorm.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671041916/102-0667048-7760903?v=glance
Um, no. As a recipient of said email, I can say that NASA HQ Public Affairs prepared a list of questions and answers related to the movie and distributed it to staff scientists. Scientists were not told not to discuss the movie, but rather not to just pass on the Q&A to the media, because HQ wants to keep track of media calls for comment. They can’t do that if the Q&A is circulating randomly.
From what I’ve seen in the trailers, I think it’s safe to say that this movie will be much, much worse than The Core or Armageddon in terms of inaccuracies (and those two were fairly bad). I almost feel drawn to see it in the same way you can’t look away from a terrible trainwreck. 
You maniacs!
You froze it up!
Damn you! Damn you all to helllllll…!
What’s mind-boggling is that so many scientists who screamed bloody murder over the mistakes in “Armageddon” are finding nice things to say about this movie. What I keep hearing is, “Well, um, yes, it’s totally inaccurate… but it’s going to get people interested in global warming, so that’s a positive thing.”
Apparently, it’s okay to spew unscientific nonsense, provided you’ve got the right politcal agenda.
Are you serious, astorian? Who are these “many” scientists who say it’s okay, as long as it brings attention to global warming? 
I haven’t noticed any scientific praise for this movie yet.
My uniform experience with natural disaster movies has been that we scientists are left shaking our heads, because it will take that much more effort to straighten out people’s misconceptions in the aftermath. And I can already tell this movie is going to be a doozy.
Are they going to screw up the destruction of the world with a damn love story again? Independence Day wasn’t too bad, but it had a double love story. And Deep Impact had a teenage marriage and families reuniting and everything. I can’t remember what Godzilla had.