Mild Spoiler Alert!!!
The first wrong note this speculative drama started with was the ridiculous holographic display. The excuse that this was set in "the near future" doesn't work as everything else in the film is exactly as they are today. Then an unusual number of British actors appeared in roles that should have been casted to American actors. That probably doesn't make much of a difference to the non-English speaking backers of this film. Then we get inserted "interviews" like they do in those crime re-creation shows. The writing is frequently not very good and the actors were suffering for it. The shock edit techniques got tiresome early on. One actor seemed to have been instructed to imitate Mr. Scott from Star Trek. The whole thing was getting like those bad made-for-TV movies on the Sci-Fi Channel here. I was ready to find something else to watch.
Then the first eruption happens and suddenly the film take a good turn. It gets very tense and urgent. The tone changes for the better and stays that way until about 10 minutes before the end when the film loses focus again.
The science is much better than anything out of the Hollywood disaster machine lately. But that really isn't much to be proud of. Just turning by on the Weather Channel after the film was premiered, you could easily see that if a similar event happened just then, the outcome would be much different. Most of the ash would be deposited in Cannda, not that that wouldn't be with out it's own set of problems for the world.
By the end I was wondering what the point of it all was. I had the strange feeling that this was all some sort of British fantasy about the lousy yanks getting their just desserts. Sort of like how "Rocky" was really a white boys revenge fantasy on African Americans. Or the many Hollywood films of the 1980's and 90's where the black character is killed off halfway thru the film as a subtle way to tell African-Americans that it wasn't a good idea to be heroic or try to be successful. Interestingly, something like this happens in Supervolcano when the ONLY black character in the film is killed by the volcano.
On a technical note, the film was shown in a 3 hour time slot with plenty of commercial breaks and a 30 minute mini-documentary hosted by Tom Brokaw. I assume that nothing was cut.
The first wrong note this speculative drama started with was the ridiculous holographic display. The excuse that this was set in "the near future" doesn't work as everything else in the film is exactly as they are today. Then an unusual number of British actors appeared in roles that should have been casted to American actors. That probably doesn't make much of a difference to the non-English speaking backers of this film. Then we get inserted "interviews" like they do in those crime re-creation shows. The writing is frequently not very good and the actors were suffering for it. The shock edit techniques got tiresome early on. One actor seemed to have been instructed to imitate Mr. Scott from Star Trek. The whole thing was getting like those bad made-for-TV movies on the Sci-Fi Channel here. I was ready to find something else to watch.
Then the first eruption happens and suddenly the film take a good turn. It gets very tense and urgent. The tone changes for the better and stays that way until about 10 minutes before the end when the film loses focus again.
The science is much better than anything out of the Hollywood disaster machine lately. But that really isn't much to be proud of. Just turning by on the Weather Channel after the film was premiered, you could easily see that if a similar event happened just then, the outcome would be much different. Most of the ash would be deposited in Cannda, not that that wouldn't be with out it's own set of problems for the world.
By the end I was wondering what the point of it all was. I had the strange feeling that this was all some sort of British fantasy about the lousy yanks getting their just desserts. Sort of like how "Rocky" was really a white boys revenge fantasy on African Americans. Or the many Hollywood films of the 1980's and 90's where the black character is killed off halfway thru the film as a subtle way to tell African-Americans that it wasn't a good idea to be heroic or try to be successful. Interestingly, something like this happens in Supervolcano when the ONLY black character in the film is killed by the volcano.
On a technical note, the film was shown in a 3 hour time slot with plenty of commercial breaks and a 30 minute mini-documentary hosted by Tom Brokaw. I assume that nothing was cut.