User reviews

It is said that if you gave a thousand monkeys typewriters, eventually they will write Shakespeare... Guess what. They aren't done yet.

This movie or for those into PURE science fiction. Things that happen in this movie could only happen in a fantasy world. They should have added a laugh track and called it a comedy. I wish writers would try to write a disaster movie based on something that could really happen, but turn it up just a bit. A 10.5 earthquake sounds horrific (which it would be) but the things that they lead you to believe that could happen if there were one is just too far out there.

The only reason to watch this is to see the CGI.

This certainly was better than I expected from Filmrise, and considering it is a TV miniseries, I expected it was designed to give excitement, danger and entertainment. And that is about all it was. It is full of cliches, as if they ran down a check list of what audiences might expect. They wrap it in pseudo-science terms, and naturally have a discredited scientist as the person who is the one who can explain what is happening. There currently are major film franchises that have action as far fetched as in this series, and they make a lot of money. Even when they were supposed to be witnessing actual locations, they failed. King's Peak in Utah is nothing like they pretended to show. And they laid on the drama by having some take risks that no sane person would ever do just to keep up the excitement for the audience. They threw in a lot of shouting and screaming in the third installment for good measure. In the trapped scene in the Las Vegas casino, when it was insisted they had to go up to get out, it reminded me of a certain movie about an overturned ocean liner.

scientific credibility, you might think that the producers would have at least done a good job filming this.

Alas, no. The CGI are good for a TV film, which isn't saying much, but the ENTIRE film (virtually every scene) is filmed in that modern, irritating "zoom-o-matic" style of cinematography. In order to lend a sense of action or reality, the camera zooms in or out every few seconds. The whole film looks like Uncle Ernie trying his new 8 mm camera out at Christmas, 1978. I timed one shot of the President's daughter talking to a doctor. It was 8 seconds long and had 5 zooms in it.

A very, very dumb film made very, very poorly.

What is wrong with director John Lafia? Any chance of this film being any good was destroyed by the constant zoom in and zoom out. I have not seen many home movies filmed this bad. The constant zooming was so annoying that after an hour I had to turn it off. Of the hour I did watch the acting and dialog was unbearable. I really can't say if it got any better but the first hour was dreadful!

What is wrong with the directors in Hollywood now days? Why do they insist that all action scenes need to be filmed with a shaking camera or zooming all over the place (like MI:3)?

I liked the old days when good acting and action carried the scene not the blurred shaky camera work of today!

This is an escapist entertainment featuring a cast of good actors and some commendable production values - all rendered pointless by the director's incessant (and I do mean incessant) abuse of the zoom lens. Whose idea was that? The director? The director of photography? Who holds the blame? It became so nauseating that it effectively spoiled everybody else's hard work. The director is not a novice and yet he allows this same grievous mistake to sink this film as he did the previous 10.5 disaster TV movie. There seems to be a mistaken notion that manipulating the zoom lens equates with directorial style. Jess Franco would even be embarrassed.

This film makes a tremendous amateur blunder from from the very beginning: it assumes the audience has seen (what I understand to be) the first film. (I hadn't.) There is no build-up, no dramatic lead-in, no preparing the viewer for what is about to happen... no indication there even WAS a prior film. In the first 60 seconds this drops cataclysm right into our laps with no preparation, no explanation, no warning. BAM! Here's an earthquake. BAM! Here's a tidal wave! BAM! Here's a volcano blowing its top.

Same holds true for the characters. There are no references to the prior film, no flashbacks to explain the existing story, nothing to prepare the audience for characters that pop out of nowhere and we're just supposed to magically understand their backgrounds and issues and empathize with what's going on.

The result: I paused this turkey after 15 minutes of ridiculously bad directing, came to IMDB and read the reviews, then shut it off... glad that I didn't waste three hours on what I'd already figured to be a prime example of how not to make a movie. Thanks IMDB, for helping me not turn that loser 15 minutes into a total loser evening.

The camera zooming back and forth was probably the single most irritating aspect of this disastrous disaster movie, that was even worse than the one before it. How actors with the talent of Kim Delaney and Frank Langella got roped into this pathetic film is bewildering. Scientifically it was atrocious.

The special effects were even worse, if that's possible, than the script and the direction.

I suspect that like Sharon Lawrence, who after leaving NYPD, got stuck in the equally tacky disaster flick 'Atomic Twister', Kim probably hopes that her participation in both these films will be quickly forgotten.

The part 1 was so bad it was funny, which is why we decided to watch the part 2 but part 2 didn't even manage to rise to the level of 'so bad it's funny', it was just pathetic.

This film may deserve a score of minus 1.

Actually, I think the special effects were done fairly well, considering the scope of what they were trying to portray.

I mean it wasn't of Star Wars caliber, but it was entertaining, and most frightening.

As with most TV disaster movies you are limited to the extent you are able to take the special effects.

I felt the actors portrayed to the best of their ability the feelings that one might encounter, if facing this type of terrible disaster.

After what happened in real life to New Orleans and other southern states, and what they face each year from Hurricanes and Tornadeos alone, nothing is beyond the realm of possibility.

You know when someone learns Microsoft Powerpoint for the first time, that they have to prove their worth by including every single type of transition in the arsenal on every element, text, image, other. This movie was the same.

Zoom Zoom should be the title of this movie. I think I got up and walked away from the TV about all of 2 times, the first and the last; both times to get headache pills.

Count me out of the final half. Double yuck two thumbs down.

No

and

Thanks.

1. To call the acting sophomoric would be an insult to every sophomore out there. It's bad. Truly, unbelievably bad. Stilted. Forced. Wooden. (Dorothy Parker would revise her Hepburn comment here; many of the performers can't even run the gamut of emotions from A to B. As I've called some political commentators, "a one note symphony.") 2. I'm sure the reason for the in-out-in-out-up-down-left-right-left-right camera swings are to create a feeling of i*n*t*e*n*s*i*t*y and d*r*a*m*a. All they have done for me is create a feeling of m*o*t*i*o*n s*i*c*k*n*e*s*s. Once or twice might make for drama. Continual swings become tedious, at best. (I want the name of the lame brain that came up with this idiotic maneuver. I plan to send him or her a bill for my migraine meds.) 3. Since it's pathetically obvious that nobody on the writing staff took (let alone, passed) Basic Geology--could they have at *least* watched a half dozen National Geographic specials??? Willing suspension of disbelief is one thing; this is a whole different animal. ("Volcano" managed to keep people suckered in for a couple of hours--of course, it had the advantage of having a few people who could act.)

The best thing you can say about this waste of film is... it's a sequel that's just as good as the original from whence it sprang: LOUSY.

(And here we thought "Reunite Pangea!" was just a kicky t-shirt. Sheesh.)

This movie is not even remotely scientifically accurate. I'm pretty sure the writers haven't even passed basic high school earth science nor ever watched a PBS documentary on earthquakes to have gotten pretty much everything wrong. There are also many, many moments that were beyond even basic common sense, and I was yelling at my TV. The acting was pretty decent, and the actors were gorgeous and/or stately. Some of the lines were pure cheese, however. However, it's far from being the worse disaster movie or mini-series that I've ever seen, and it was a decent enough way to send a few hours on a rainy day. Don't expect to learn anything about a) science, b) surviving a disaster, or c) health care, and take it for what it is: escapist fantasy.

Even the CGI effects...the only reason for watching this kind of crap... is bad. Some of the effects look like a badly done video game. THe destruction of Hawaii is particularly bad. The script is embarrassing. The characters are one cliché after another. The actors seem to be making no effort whatsoever..but considering how bad the script is you can't blame them. The original film was bad enough, but at least some of the effects were decent. This one lacks even that. Everyone involved with this should be ashamed foe themselves. A lot of this film is not even done on a minimum professional level. Even the infamous Sci Fi Channel original movies, bad as they are, manage that. If Uwe Boll made a TV miniseries, this is what it would look like.

I totally agree with the other commentators on this movie. The director used the Zoom lever on the camera WAY TOO MUCH! I don't think there is a single scene in which there is no zooming without a purpose. The zooming was so intense and persistent that it made my head spin. The other thing I found totally annoying was that there was just as much, if not more, commercial time than movie time.

I like sci-fi movies, so I turned in for the second half, but wow. Last time I checked, it takes time to decode, process, and display data on a computer screen. This movie seems imply that satellite data on multiple layers are viewable immediately after the event happens.

I simply can't wait for MST3K to get ahold of this one.

Cool Graphics, Cool Plot, Cool Acting, Realistically It Was Decent Except for the part where everyone is crying at the end, it was retarded you could tell everyone was faking it, and when Jordon was looking at the dam, and then realized that he should leave and the pilot is sitting there waiting for him to say something, if i were that pilot i would of kept my distance from that. all in all it was a OK, i would give a 6 out of 10. just because it was entertaining to see what could happen when the earth really decides to do what this movie shows us.

Hope This Was Helpful

There isn't a whole lot that can be said about the 2006 two-part TV miniseries 10.5: APOCALYPSE that hasn't been said about its 2004 "prequel" (which was just "plain-old" 10.5), except that it's a special effects extravaganza come true, with zero fidelity to scientific plausibility. This time, an all-star cast, including Kim Delaney, Beau Bridges (as the President), Dean Cain, and Frank Langella, find that the catastrophic earthquakes that leveled Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle in the original miniseries are growing so intense that they will eventually split the continental shelf asunder, and cause parts of the United States to separate. This, of course, requires radical and (naturally) implausible action.

John Lafia, who both directed and co-wrote both this film and the original, went to great pains to declare both films to be entertainment, not to be believed. He's right, of course; but the same could be said for a lot of similarly apocalyptic mega-disaster movies of the last decade and a half. The hard truth of the matter is that it's just very hard, to get past the level of implausibility that is thrown the viewer's way in 10.5: APOCALYPSE, and how sometimes the acting by an otherwise credible cast veers occasionally towards the laughable. Even previous films like the 1974 sci-fi/disaster opus EARTHQUAKE, or the 1990 made-for-TV film THE BIG ONE: THE GREAT LOS ANGELES EARTHQUAKE (both of which depicted the wiping off the map of Los Angeles), and the later 2009 Roland Emmerich-directed end-of-the-world spectacle "2012", compared to 10.5: APOCALYPSE, are made by this film to look like as if someone on the order of Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg directed them, since the implausibility and the frequently lame dialogue weighs everything down to a large degree. And Lafia's overuse of the zoom lens is especially grating, though, to be honest, this is a two-part TV miniseries, and not a big-screen extravaganza.

But then again, you will most likely not be seeing this film for plausibility, since the biggest reason for the existence of 10.5: APOCALPYSE, as was the case with the original, is the incredible special effects destruction sequences, this time involving Las Vegas and Houston; and the rescue sequences are done with a certain measure of credibility. This is, as advertised, a very uneven flick, and probably should rate a zero for plausibility, though to be kind I'll give it a '2'. As a special effects lover's paradise, however, I'm indeed rating it a 10.5, which averages out to a '6' on the IMDb ratings scale (or 6.25, to be on the nose).