Category 6: Day of Destruction (2004)

When you're halfway through a disaster movie and you find yourself rooting for the disaster, then you know that something's gone wrong. As usual for these types of movies I found myself hoping that all the lead characters would just die, the sooner the better. The only person I liked was the cranky artist who gets stuck in a lift. Other than that it's just a bunch of walking clichés that should have been shot at the earliest opportunity.Not only are the characters the usual clichés - whiny teenagers who fall apart at the first sign of trouble, the evil corporation bosses who prize money over safety, the old, exhausted boss due to retire who knows everything and the bureaucratic idiot replacement, the pilot hero who can keep flying for 150 hours straight, the dogged reporter, the bonkers hacker - but the plot holes are big enough to sink Chicago in. And, of course, nobody does anything logical.A huge plot point is that the power goes out in Chicago, and then there's a huge effort to bring the power back online, and then the 'hacker' who took the power out tries to bring the power back online, again. However, he seems to have no ability to see that the power is already on? Why? Don't bother looking for an explanation, there isn't one. So the power goes out, then it's on briefly, and then it's out again - because power plus power equals zero. So there's no power, except when a protagonist HAS to make a vital phone call, or when a siren HAS to go off on top of a building, or a computer connection has to be made, ...The movie looks like it had a decent enough budget, or there's warehouse in America with over a hundred hours of disaster footage. Sadly, the budget wasn't spent on a decent script, or better actors. A lot of lines felt as though they were place markers until a better line was created. Sadly, the better lines never turned up. Were the actors any good? Can't tell as there was no need for anyone to act, they just had to deliver awful lines with wooden faces.Why can't people make a disaster films and concentrate on a single storyline? Instead, you have dozens of sub-plots, side-plots, wasted-plots, irrelevant-plots, and go-nowhere-plots that just fill in the time between the opening and closing credits. This film is like an elongated episode in a naff soap opera. If you find that you can keep up with who all the characters are and what their issues are, then you've watched too much daytime soaps and need to get a life.As a cure for insomnia this is an excellent movie. That's about the only useful thing this film is good for.

I was prepared to rate this movie somewhere between 6-8, while watching the first 2/3rds or so of this 2-part made-for-TV film. But then, things began to fall apart for me. First, one of the pilots in the Air Force plane said, for dramatic effect regarding the hurricane in the Great Lakes: "Off the charts!" Then he says it again a short time later... really a weak and lazy attempt to build the doomsday tension. Then, they comment on how the waves are 15 meters high, but when we actually see the waves a short time later, they are maybe... oh, 3 or 4 feet high? Huge let-down. They're using CGI, so surely they could simulate some sort of gigantic wave 15 meters high?? And the clincher... not ONCE during the movie was the death toll even hinted at, which was quite odd, given the heavy destruction all over the place. They never once gave a ball-park guesstimate "perhaps tens of thousands of people killed", or even "millions", which might be more accurate. Not that I wanted to see people die. But to make it more realistic in a movie about "catastrophe", surely someone would have mentioned the possible death toll?! All we really got was at the closing scene, where the weather chief says that it could be "several weeks" before we have an accurate count of the "fatalities." Well, duh. No one's asking for an "accurate count" right now. Just give us something, anything! Also, again with the Air Force pilots: one of them makes a remark regarding the upcoming tornado and hurricane colliding, "Either one will be destructive ...together they will be deadly." Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that the tornadoes were already quite deadly, given the massive destruction that had already taken place. Seems the movie's dialog was mostly concerned with property damage, not fatalities. Keep in mind this was made during the cable news era, where you get updates every 5 minutes on the possible death toll (think Haiti and Joplin, Missouri for starters.)But if you can suspend belief during some of these gaffes, (which I tried my best to do), the rest of the movie is actually quite good. Decent subplots, decent acting, interesting characters, the CGI was okay for the most part. I might have given this a 7 or 8, if not for the conspicuous flaws mentioned above.

If you thought Day after tomorrow was implausible, wait till you see this.Okay so the premise of most disaster films is usually a 1 in billion event occurring, compounded by other circumstances. In this case, the even is the joining of two huge storm systems. Fair enough so far. Oh but hold up, no, the "event" is the sabotage and subsequent destruction of the power grid.Next throw in loads of human interest elements - in this case a cheating husband, a psychotic gun-wielding boyfriend, a rebellious daughter, a hacker with a point to prove, a senator trying to push an agenda, a reporter trying to stand up against "the man", and a pregnant women stuck in an elevator.Finally add a handful of taster events to add excitement.Jeez if the director tried to fit in any more meaningless plot lines, there would have been no time less for the actual disaster, which, given the pitiful state of the computer graphics, was almost certainly the intention.Jeez, if you can't even model a truck convincingly, you really should not be taking on twisters, exploding power stations, Las Vegas getting ripped apart, or destroyed oil stations.In case you didn't already gather how appalling this movie is, let me just add that all three bad guys get killed in separate, and wholly ungratifying, implausible manners, that stunk more of moralising that good film-making.I'm have no problem with first month film students writing jaded, hackneyed, cliché-soaked scripts, but for god's sake, that doesn't mean anyone has to make them into movies!It manages to make the abysmally implausible 10.0 Apocalypse look not quite so dreadful. Avoid them both.

The only reason I know this film exists is because I wanted to see what Nancy McKeon had been up to since The Facts of Life ended. When I searched her name, up came this relatively new TV movie. After much investigation I managed to locate a copy & was thoroughly disappointed with what I viewed. D Grade acting, poor script, terrible FX - it was like watching a toned down, more stupefied version of Day After Tomorrow that went for 3 hours. Despite the long running time the characters remain fairly under-developed, we do not care about them in the slightest & in most cases are longing for their demise. Combine that with terrible lighting & cinematography & you have a real disaster of a film. How they con-viced so many "name" actors (i.e Dianne Weist, Randy Quaid, Brian Dennehy) to appear in such trash is mind-blowing. In summary - I want those 3 hours of my life back!!!