Back to USGS HQ. Ian the Asian Flunky—he’s good with computers, who would have guessed?—comes into Sam’s office and calls up a computer model he’s been working on. According to this, the entire country will within 48 hours (!!!) literally be blanketed with catastrophic seismic events. Sam immediately phones the President and his staff to share these findings.
“Ancient fracture zones and stress points,” Sam explains, “are being reawakened in the entire Central and Western United States.” The best case scenario, she continues, will be “a string of more catastrophic quakes and volcanic eruptions throughout this region.” Much more egregious, however, is the danger posed by predicted incidents in the Midwest.
Sam explains that long ago, the entire middle section of the United was in fact a “vast sea.” Should the anticipated events occurs, within two days (again, c’mon!) the entire middle third of the United States, which is “barely above sea level,” will once more be underwater, dividing the remaining North American continent into two, much diminished landmasses. “The geography of North America,” she sums up, “could be changed beyond all recognition.
Hey, since this would also affect Canada, maybe we should check to see what help they can offer. Ha, but I kid.
On the other hand, joking aside, it’s too bad that we never get a clue as to what is happening to the rest of the world. Even assuming that no other continent is facing similar seismic destruction—and I find that unlikely, since surely all the plates are moving—it’s astounding to imagine the impact on the rest of the globe should America basically cease to exist as a financial, military and political power in a span of about four or five days. Things must be getting…interesting in many a location.
With a more localized disaster looming in Las Vegas (with the show’s first night’s chapter nearly at an end, we obviously need a Bad CGI Disaster Vignette to wrap it up), Earl calls his daughter and explains that he feels tremors. However, when Sam has her staff check their Magical Super-Computers, they don’t show anything.
Still, the first 10.5 taught us that there is something even more powerful than a Magical Super-Computer: One’s Gut. “You’re staring at a bunch of machines!” her father snorts. “You’re not feeling it, Sam! You’re not feeling it in your bones!”
Seconds later, the Super-Computers confirm what Earl’s bones already knew, that tremors are starting there. He explains his quickly formulated theory, that magmatic heat or some damn thing has acidified the water conifers under the city, eating away at the sandstone bedrock. “The whole city is sitting on a crumbling slab of Swiss cheese!” he exclaims.
This statement naturally presages the climatic Bad CGI Disaster Vignette. And in the case, when I say Bad CGI, I mean it. This whole sequence, albeit brief, is horrendously cheap-looking. One shot in particular, of extras running around in front of a rear screen projection, is nothing less than laugh out loud funny. I understand that they must have run out of money at some point, but this shot is just flat out embarrassing.
Meanwhile, because it would have cost more money to animate all individual buildings crumbling to pieces (as this would have required much more intensive CGI rendering), instead the cityscape just lowers into the ground, pretty much intact, much like the buildings hijacked by the Mole Man in the first issue of The Fantastic Four.
Meanwhile, Earl, having come back up the elevator to the main floor, takes command sa rubble falls on the various extras. “OK, everybody, get down!” he yells. Yeah, good thing he was there. Nobody else would have thought of ‘everybody, get down.’ Then he rushes to pull aside a woman about to be crushed by a big neon ice cream cone. Amazingly, the woman he saves is none other than Laura. (EVERYONE IS CONNECTED.)
And so Las Vegas sinks from sight. Join us on Tuesday night for…
Part 2
Editorial Note:
I’m sure that small whatever percentage of readers is still bothering to trudge through this review is—hi, there—is now filled with a mixture of horror and despair. Is this piece really only half over? Please, won’t some kindly soul stab me through the eye with an ice pick and end my misery?
Fear not, though. I’ve been doing this for a while, and my guess is that we’re a good two-thirds of the way through the review. That’s because the establishing stuff requires greater scrutiny and detail than the body of the film does. Now that the cast and general situation have been introduced, things should move a lot quicker. Also, the second half of the film will presumably feature more set pieces, which don’t really need much examination past a description of what’s going on.
Plus, man, I’m getting tired of this thing.
******
I get a good laugh before the second part even begins. The opening promo promises, “Tonight…Disaster…Beyond Imagination.” I don’t wish to be overly pedantic, but if it were literally ‘beyond imagination,’ it couldn’t very well have been written into a script and then filmed, could it? Especially by this bunch, since ‘imagination’ hasn’t proven one of their strong points.
******
We open in the Oval Office. Not once have we seen the President address the nation. Given that San Francisco has apparently just been razed, this seems a little suspect. The President’s chief advisor is arguing against the nuclear bomb plan. After all, if we’re to buy into Hollister being a great leader, we’ll have to see him make a decision when everyone around him is against it. Presumably he’ll consult his gut.
In the real world, this is crap. When the advisor expresses a fear that the bombs could actually make the situation worse, the President explodes. “What are you suggesting, that we do nothing?” he roars. “I’d rather have faith in something and be wrong, than faith in nothing at all!”
That sounds dandy, but sometimes the best idea is to do nothing. I myself might offer as an example of counterproductive activity spending gigantic sums to try to alleviate global warming. Others might suggest our invasion of Iraq. In either case, you’ll find advocates for the aggressive approach. I myself support our action in the Middle East, for instance.
Which is all fine, but a general policy of “I’d rather do something wrong than nothing at all” is not a reassuring refrain to hear from the single most powerful individual in the world. Government is not the panacea for every problem in the world, although you wouldn’t know it from a film that believes it inspirational for a governor to take personal responsibility for the safety of every single individual living in her state.
Troops move in on the West Coast, largely to oversee the evacuation of the seaboard. However, Nolan also has a team traveling around to drill at the six spots indicated by Sam and put the warheads in place. Of course, the logical thing would be to have six different teams doing this—or at least two or three—since time is such an issue. However, if they did things the logical way it would reduce opportunities for later suspense.
We hear a variety of expository news reports, including the line, “The White House has refused to give out any information before tonight’s speech.” So they haven’t (I’m guessing) announced the evacuation yet, but have moved presumably tens or even hundreds of thousands of troops into the state, all without any explanation to the public? Again, what universe do the writers of this movie live in?
We get cuts of all the various characters and some staccato ‘suspense’ music cues as Hollister finally begins his press conference. As you’d suspect by now, the speech is ‘inspirational’ and ‘poetic’ in the worst possible manner. I especially liked the line, as he nears broaching the delicate idea of the nuclear bombs plan, “Are we going to allow this earthquake to shake the foundations of our spirit, our community, and the ties that bind us all together?” Oh, brother. Let me make a request here. If you ever should meet Beau Bridges while walking down the street, and he won’t look you in the eye, just stop and give him a hug and tell him it’s not his fault. (No pun intended.)
Cut to the rubble where the San Francisco City Hall once stood. A battered Carla wakes up in the wreckage. She hears Rachel crying nearby, and digs her out. The latter moans that she can’t feel her legs. Yep, Rachel is one of our sacrificial characters. Oh, now, not Rachel! I shall always remember the two and a half minutes of screentime we shared up to now.
Anyhoo, Rachel’s expiration is played as pointlessly agonizing. It is also drawn out to great length, being, naturally, intercut with other scenes. She lives long enough to express sobbing regrets that she never took the time to have that family she and her husband always wanted. This is all as inexpressibly awful as I’m sure you’re guessing it to be. I won’t say that it’s completely unaffecting, because it’s not hard to wring emotion from someone who’s trapped in a collapsed building and dying in pain and with great regrets. Still, you’re never unaware of how grossly manipulative the scene is.
Back at Generic Hospital. Zach tells Owen he should go to his family while Zach stays behind to oversee the evacuation. Of course, Owen decides he has to stay. So you’d think, since he appears to be in charge of the entire hospital, somehow. He phones Jill for a tear-streaked “I can’t believe we were fighting over a car, and now I know that all that matters is that I love you,” blah blah blah. (He does most of the apologizing about their spat, needless to say.) Anyway, he tells her to load the kids up and get out of Dodge. She rounds the kids up and even more tears are spilt. Gack. Could we get to a city falling down or something?
Back at Team HQ, an aide escorts an unannounced Zach into Nolan’s office. I’m not sure what I found more unrealistic, that Zach would have time to leave the overburdened hospital as it prepares for evacuation, that he can drive across Los Angeles after the entire city’s been informed that it will be evacuated, or that things are loose enough that you can just walk into the FEMA command center during all this.
Nolan is packing up his stuff, prior to hitting the field. Zach once more demands to know what’s going on. Nolan’s refusal to tell him continues to be viewed as evidence of his being a distant father. This is textbook horrible writing. When one sits down to pen (or type) a verbal confrontation between two characters, a good writer will tend to have each participant answer according to his own beliefs, personality and level of intelligence.
Nolan, one must presume, is meant to be at least a reasonably intelligent person. Thus, when confronted by a son demanding to know classified information purely on the basis of kinship, one might expect at least a couple of different responses. First, Nolan could obviously just point out that the President of the United States himself has ordered him to keep such details on a need to know basis. By no reasonable standard, even as a doctor at a large municipal hospital smack dab in a possible disaster zone, does Zach have such. If that decision had be made, he would have had it already.
Even sitting here, though, I could formulate a better response that Nolan could have employed. Zach is a doctor. What if, as an agent of the federal government, Nolan showed up one day and demanded access to the confidential medical files of a number of patients. What if he didn’t even present a good reason to know this information, but purely was putting the arm on Zach on the basis of being his father? Wouldn’t Zach’s compliance represent an appalling level of malfeasance?
The difference is, I suppose, the film’s juvenile emphasis on the private concerns of the individual. People with vast public responsibilities are presented as running away from personal issues by failing to confront them right in the middle of this gigantic crisis. Rachel’s husband hounds her during this period, and her remorseful demise is obviously meant to suggest that she should have taken the time, even in the midst of all this, to discuss their problems.
Meanwhile, the film is pretty clearly taking Zach’s side on this. If anything, the implication is that Zach’s demands for information are all the stronger because he doesn’t have a need to know. Surely any good father would bend some piddling rules if it would demonstrate that he loves his son. Nolan’s refusal to do so, therefore, is played entirely as an example of him pushing Zach away, rather than his performing as best he can a very important job.
On the other hand, the film doesn’t want to present Nolan as a brute, either. Otherwise, his eventual heroic death (oops, sorry) wouldn’t arouse—or so the thinking goes—audience empathy. Therefore Nolan is allowed to tacitly display his feelings by trying to get Zach to take a private helicopter to safety. In the end, though, that apparently isn’t enough. Bending rules by diverting a government chopper to take his son out of danger isn’t enough. Rules must be shattered if Roy is to prove he cares. That he won’t do so is merely another example of his paternal failings.
In the end, though, Zach does get a bone or two. Reading his dad’s face, he realizes that the government won’t be able to get everyone to safety in time. (I mean, please. This is a surprise, that the entire coast of California can’t be evacuated from scratch in a day or two?) “Give me the real numbers [of potential casualties],” he demands, “not the press numbers.” Grimfaced, Nolan replies, “Millions.” Zach, proving that one can be a hotshot surgeon without much mathematical ability, proves shocked by this figure.
Nolen hits the road, traveling with a team of military engineers. They are to travel to six spots Sam has designated, bore down hundreds of feet into the bedrock, and plant a nuclear warhead. Once all six are in place, they will be remote detonated. We’ll cut back to the team occasionally, usually as Sam is phoning Nolan in an effort to get him to hurry up. Again, I don’t think one needs to be a logistical genius to wonder why they don’t just have multiple teams attending to this task. Other, of course, as to allow for more potential ‘suspense.’
My favorite part of this occurs at “Warhead Site One.” As they begin operations, Nolan phones Sam. “Dr. Hill,” he inquires, “how deep do we have to drill?” (!!!) I don’t know, that seems to me the sort of information he might have been briefed on before hitting the road with half a dozen nuclear bombs.
The operation to plant the first device eats up a fair amount of time. This includes, naturally, numerous cuts to other locations, so that we can see glimpses of Sam and the President looking all concerned and such. (“I hope this works,” Sam pronounces. Yes, thanks for keeping us apprised of the characters’ deepest, most hidden thoughts.) This sequence is unlikely to make anyone’s all-time list of great movie scenes. Even so, I have to admit that the picture definitely works better when it focuses on anything other than character interaction.
Another highlight is that the scene affords us one more opportunity to hear a character dramatically reading numbers off a computer screen. This time it’s a guy monitoring how deep the bomb presently is as it’s being lowered. “270 feet!” [pause] “272!” [pause] “273!” [pause] “275 feet!” Etc. It’s Guy-Reading-Numerals-Off-A-Computer action at its very hottest.
Once the device is set in place, the shaft is filled with gravel and dirt. The warhead is “set.’ “Switching remote detonation capability over to you, Dr. Hill,” Nolan says into his headset. That’s right, since the nuclear bomb plan was Sam’s, that means she has been assigned to personally push the button that sets the devices off. (Although she won’t do so until all the bombs are set.) You know how jury foremen in death penalty cases themselves are brought in to pull the switch on Ol’ Sparky. It’s like that.
Back to the woods. Clark and Amanda are still walking around. However, Amanda’s finally gotten a signal on her cell phone and gets through to the Governor’s office. (Even assuming she has some super-private number, I again doubt that you’d be able to get a line into the place in the middle of all this, especially with Carla still missing.) Then the signal cuts out again, leaving Amada understandably distraught. “Let’s keep walking,” Clark suggests. That would have made a very appropriate tagline for the mini-series, actually, and in several ways.
Meanwhile, some firemen find Carla amidst the rubble, and we cut to a commercial. The bumper shows one of the bombs breaking loose as it’s being lowered into its shaft and getting stuck part way down. Glad I won’t find myself subjected to a sudden shock when that occurs later in the actual film.
Back to the show. The highways are jammed with cars as people attempt to get out of Los Angeles and reach one of the federal evacuation camps. Meanwhile, Jill and the kids are packing up the SUV. (I was hoping to see some loony California environmental types attempting to fit their essential survival gear, like their hookahs, into their teeny electric cars. Meanwhile, their SUV-owning neighbors, long the victims of their nutbag hectoring, would be enjoying a hearty laugh at their expense. No such luck, though. Really, could Ed Begley, Jr., have been so uninterested in an “as himself” credit?)
Meanwhile, Hollister is told that Carla has been found, but is in critical condition. Worse, all possible state and federal resources are currently deployed, but they won’t be enough to evacuate everyone in time. Again, duh. You’re talking tens of millions of people here. Hollister blusters things like, “We will save everyone.” His aide grimly responds, “Some things are just out of our hands.”
“I don’t believe that,” Hollister growls. In any other sort of picture, such a messianic streak would be evidence that the President was a dangerous megalomaniac. (Meaning that he’d be explicitly identified as a Republican.) Here, it’s meant to prove him a great leader. On the other hand, I’m sure Carla is still personally overseeing the safety of each and every person in California from her coma.
Cut to Warhead Site Three. If I’m following this, they do have at least two drilling teams, as the shaft seems to be finished before Nolan arrives with the bomb. And although I think it unlikely, under the circumstances, let’s just go along with the idea that the bombs are not to be placed without Nolan’s direct supervision. However, that still doesn’t answer why Nolan and the bombs are traveling by road. It seems to me that when one is traversing much of the entire state of California, that helicopters would be much faster.
Cut to a crowded hospital. Suffering from a concussion and a broken leg, Carla is lying on a gurney in a hallway (yeah, right, the frickin’ governor). Donna is there when she comes to. Carla asks after Rachel, and Donna delivers the dire news. Pathos, bathos, and so on. Carla tearfully notes that she’ll have to call Rachel’s husband, just so we know that she’s remained all caring and stuff.
Carla then asks after her family, and we segue to the woods. “I’m sorry for bringing you out here, Amanda” Clark tells her. “I screwed up. I’ve screwed up everything with you. Yep, time for the bonding to begin. “The important thing is that you’re here for me now,” she replies. And so on, as the highly original dialogue flows like fine wine.
Gaak. Anyway, with this essential scene out of the way, they hear a vehicle nearby. Running, they find a road and manage to flag down a flatbed truck, which is nearly crammed with other refugees. The camera pans over the sad faces of several children, which no one could possibly describe as a cheap attempt to pull our emotional chains.
As we approach the big climax, we jump around even more. There’s a scene of very mild pandemonium outside the hospital, where the patients are being evacuated. Compared to similar sequences in films as old as George Pal’s War of the Worlds, it isn’t much. “This city’s going to blow,” Zach predicts in horror. First, duh. Second, some might think that stuff like this should be shown rather than just talked about.
Meanwhile, Carla, now ensconced in an actual room, sits up and is apprised of the situation. She attempts to rise, wanted to take command, but Donna assures her that they are doing everything that can be done. Still, we again see that Carla, you know, really, really cares. And that’s the important thing, isn’t it? Exhausted by her own superior morality, Carla sinks back into her hospital bed.
At Warhead Site Four, the team is running into trouble. The bedrock here is particularly dense, and their drill bits keep breaking. Nolan contacts Sam, who insists that they keep trying. The hole here, she maintains, must be over 400 feet deep. She signs off, and Jordan pops over, insisting that she get some sleep. He finally cojoles her into taking a nap, and she gives him a kiss before she retires. Jordan reacts with a ‘well, now it’s all worthwhile’ sort of smile. Glad the whole mass destruction thing is working out for you, dude.
Cut to the White House. An aide informs Hollister that the tent city erected in the California desert outside Barstow as an evac center is already packed beyond capacity. “Then we’ll have to make it bigger,” Hollister growls with resolute determination. Of course!! Make it bigger!! What a bold solution!! (Another idea? Multiple evac centers. But what do I know?) The aide, lacking Hollister’s brilliant mind, reacts with confusion. “Sir?” he asks questioningly. “Get me the governor of Nevada,” the President commands with determined resolution.
Meanwhile, Clark and Amanda have reached the aforementioned Evac Camp. Amanda learns that Clark has remained emotionally and even psychically unattached since he and Carla broke up. In fact, he admits, he still loves her mother. Hmm, I wonder where this could be headed? I guess I’m glad that Clark and Amanda are now completely open with one another, but did we really have to see it? I’m beginning to wish they’d been buried with the SUV.
With the way the movie’s jumping around at this point (not to mention how stupidly long this review is getting), I think I’m going to go to Bullet Time:
- We get a big matte shot of the evac camp, obviously inspired by the famous shot in Gone With the Wind where the camera pulls up and back to reveal thousands of wounded Confederate soldiers in the Atlanta rail yard. I was amused to see that the shot from the 1939 movie actually still looked more convincing.
- A reporter is blathering on about the gazillions of refugees flooding into the camp, then begins noting the can-do camaraderie and spirit blah blah blah as gooey inspirational music inevitably swells up on the soundtrack. Note to producers: You have to be at least a teeny bit emotionally invested in something to be inspired by it.
- Cut to Commercial. We see a clip featuring a huge fissure cutting through the middle of the evac camp. Thanks for the head’s up.
- Back to the show. As Clark and Amanda drive through the camp, they gape in appalled amazement at the site. We spend some amount of time looking around. This makes sense, since they obviously spent a fair amount of their resources collecting hundreds of extras and erecting tents and stuff. (Most of the camp, of course, is a matte shot, but even the small percentage they actually built must be a pretty large set.)
- Amanda sees a soldier and asks to use a phone. As you’d expect, all the normal lines are tied up. Clark identifies himself as Carla’s husband, and pulls what appears to be his driver’s license to prove it. Since that substantiates that he and Carla share the last name of ‘Williams,’ obviously the soldier immediately buys his story and diverts them to a command tent. (Even if it’s not his license, what would it be? Do the spouses of governors get official super special ID cards of some sort?)
- Zach and Owen arrive at the camp. Owen is obviously worried about finding his family. Zach tells him to go and look for them, that he’ll make sure their patients are cared for. Owen ultimately agrees and takes off.
- First, that’s gross dereliction of his duties as a physician. They’ve just hauled a hospital’s worth of patients into a hastily tent city in the desert. And even if he somehow felt that Zach could handle all this without him, which is insane, he should still be reporting to the authorities and proffering his services as a doctor, which presumably are at a premium right now. Of course, the film views his gross selfishness as the ‘right thing’ to do. Personal concerns, as we’ve seen throughout this show, always trump larger civic obligations.
- Second, I may have to revise my opinion on this thing’s funniest moments. We watch Owen walk around a minute portion of a camp that must currently hold millions of people, and which presumably covers, at the very least, dozens of square miles of land. As he does, his search technique involves shouting out “Jill!” occasionally. For all intents and purposes, it’s akin to him entering some corner of Los Angeles itself, and doing the same thing. This is almost hypnotically moronic.
- Zach strolls into a communications tent—again, this proves incredibly easy to do—and asks to be connected to his dad. He doesn’t offer any proof of his identity, but needless to say the call is made. Nice to know if you’re the family member of some government official, you get this special sort of treatment.
- Actually, as I watch the scene again, the guy starts putting his call through before Zach even identifies himself. I guess of the millions of refugees, only a bare few want to make phone calls. He gets through to the FEMA command center, only to be told by Jordan—who, again, is currently in charge, and thus, you might think, have better things to do—that his father is out in the field. Jordan promises to get a message to Nolan that Zach is trying to reach him. (After all, the two can’t really speak until Nolan is dying…oops, sorry.)
- I like when Jordan ascertains that Zach is “in Barstow,” so that Nolan will be able to reach him. Wouldn’t he need a somewhat more precise fix on his location than that?
- Jordan checks on Sam in the bunkroom, and finds her awake and crying. She’s being brought down by the enormity of the situation, and her plan to alleviate it. Since nothing could possibly be more important at the moment than Sam’s little personal crisis, Jordan pulls up a chair for a reassuring little chat. I hope he put someone else in charge before he came back here.
- For about the fifth time, a Leader Who Almost Cares Too Much is told, “you can’t save everyone.” Yeah, I guess if a good hunk of California’s most heavily populated coastline is threatening to drop into the ocean with a few days’ warning, that maybe they won’t be able to. You know, I could really use a leader character right now who exhibits a bit of bracing ruthlessness. Someone who can say, without bursting into tears, “Many, many people are going to die no matter what we do. Our responsibility is to try to save the largest amount of them we can.”
- Zach appears at a MASH tent to offer his services. He halts at the door flaps, gasping in horror at the conditions, including the moaning (offscreen) patients awaiting care. His shock is entirely justified, by the way. First of all, the main door flaps, representing nearly an entire wall of the tent, are secured in a completely open position!!!! Yes, that must be helping to keep things sterile. Not that there’s much dust or anything of a contaminating nature in the desert.
- This is a triage tent. That means that the surgeons here are doing the minimal amount necessary to stabilize the patients until there’s an open bed in the main surgical theater. As this is a movie, Zach, who again is an ER surgeon in a major metropolitan hospital, asks what triage duties would consist of.
- Of course, that’s because the movie needs a reason to repeat them for us. The information is vital, because triage protocols are strict. Therefore, this obviously will be where Zach learns to sublimate his hot dog, individualist streak for the Greater Good.
- Either I don’t know what a triage tent is, or the writers don’t. Zach is ordered to stop his patients’ bleeding and keep them breathing. Anyone who needs more than three hours worth of work, however, is to be shot full of morphine and allowed to die. Zach is jarred by this, and given how fairy tale oriented the film’s been up to now, I don’t blame him. He maintains he can follow these harsh guidelines, but we suspect he’ll have problems doing so, because, you know, he just cares so damn much!
- By the way, doesn’t this put the lie to the idea that Owen’s biggest responsibility is to meander about aimlessly, hoping to stumble across his family? How many lives could he have saved had he reported in, as he should have?
- Sam has returned to her station. Zoe appears, and tearfully explains that Sam’s warning about the San Francisco quake saved her family’s lives. (Man, they just have hit the road quick!) Tears, schmaltz, Sam’s faith in herself restored, blah blah.
- Carla calls Rachel’s husband from her hospital bed. Tears, bathos, etc. Carla then tells him of her final words. She tells of Rachel saying she loved him, and that she regretted their fight and that she didn’t take his calls. However, Carla completely leaves out the fact that Rachel expressed her profound remorse that she hadn’t, in fact, had children with him. Since this is what the couple’s whole final fight was about, this seems a rather gross omission on Carla’s part. When someone saves your life and then dies in agony beside you, I think you should probably do a little better than that.
- By this time, maybe half an hour after hitting the camp, Owen does come across his family. (But only after pushing aside a guard and ignoring some camp rules about where he can go. That’s OK, though, because in a film the featured players have special rights that the background extras don’t.) Tears, hugs, etc.
- Zach is operating on a patient. The chief surgeon strolls over for a look, and notes that this appears to be “a four hour job.” Meanwhile, of course, that the guy should be left to die. Zach, being the ace surgeon that he is, says he can do the job in half and hour. Oh, come on! Could a great surgeon cut corners and possible shave an hour off a normally four-hour procedure? OK, we can buy that. Hell, it’s a movie, so I’d even go along with cutting the normal time in half. But by 85%?! Please.
- Nolan phones in from Warhead Site Six. Since nothing’s gone wrong yet, certainly nothing that would put his life in danger…ah, there we go. An aftershock occurs as the bomb is being lowered into the shaft. It snaps loose and plummets halfway down before getting stuck.
- Moreover, the ‘arming cable’ has also come free. This means that the devise must be armed manually via the keypad on its side. Gad, is this contrived. Why wouldn’t they just arm them before lowering them into the hole? It’s not like nuclear devices are easily detonated, even when armed. Of course, the real reason they wrote it this way is to explain why they don’t just drop a rock down the shaft and dislodge the bomb.
- Everyone is shocked when Nolan asks if the device can be armed manually. That’s right, he’s going down the shaft to arm it himself. (Well, duh, I already figured that part out.) Gee, I hope this doesn’t mean he’ll tragically die, but in such a manner that he’ll have time to talk to his son and express his love for him, and/or President Hollister, before he gasps his last.
- Sam notes that if he goes into the shaft and arms the bomb, even if everyone goes perfectly, he won’t have time to get out of the blast radius before the explosion occurs. Since the bombs will be set off manually, instead of on a timer, I’m not sure why that would be. Other than to acknowledge beforehand his Noble Sacrifice.
- After a commercial break, Nolan sends everyone else off, and then repels down the shaft. (Which is much wider than it should be, by the way, given the size of the bit they were using.) Reaching the bomb, he straddles it. This, presumably unintentionally, calls to mind Major Kong riding the nuclear bomb down to earth in Dr. Strangelove. Hmm, what could possibly go wrong at this point?
- Nolan is given instructions on how to arm the bomb. However, there continues a series of minor aftershocks. He has entered most of the arming code—all but the very last digit, naturally—when an aftershock causes the bomb to shift. Nolan is dumped over the side, although I have no idea why he would have removed his safety line. He lands on a ledge a bit down, after which the bomb dislodges. It ends up, amazingly enough, pinning him to the ledge. You might think having a large device that presumably weighs several hundred pounds strike you flush in the chest after it plummets a ways would kill you, but you’d be wrong. Indeed, one would even be able to talk with great comfort afterward.
- In fact, it’s funnier than that. Here’s what we’ve been told so far. The shaft is 324 feet deep. The bomb was originally stuck “about a hundred feet” in. Now, Nolan reports his, and the bomb’s, position to be “about 2/3rds down.” That means that both Nolan and the bomb fell about ten stories before coming to their present location. Let’s be very generous indeed and cut that in half. All I can say is that Nolan looks remarkably spry for someone who feel fifty feet before smacking into a stone ledge, moments before a nuclear device tumbled the same distance and smacked him right in the middle of his torso. That’s one tough dude.
- Moreover, he can’t reach the keypad in order to tap in the final number. Boy, when it rains, it pours, huh?
- Hollister is called and patched through to Nolan. Nolan is ready to concede defeat, but Hollister gives him a pep talk. “You’re down by two,” he says. “Do what you do best. Make the long shot.” Hey, this ties in to the conversation they were having when we first me them? Who would have thought?! Anyway, Nolan has one final request, which is to talk to Zach. Wow! I didn’t see that coming!
- A soldier comes by the MASH tent and gets Zach. (At least there was a logical reason why they were able to locate him so quickly.) Since we need a ‘healing’ last conversation between Nolan and Zach, the latter is, of course, exactly at a point with his current patient where he can just turn to his nurse and say “Close him!” Wow, that’s convenient.
- I was thinking, though. (And that’s probably why I’m not a successful scriptwriter.) What if Zach was in the middle of the operation, and there wasn’t anyone on the tightly stretched surgical staff ready or able to relieve him? (Like, you know, Owen, since he’s off on a family holiday.) After all, Zach’s the maverick hot shot, so presumably he’s taking the toughest cases. What if the choice was talking to his dad one last time, or keeping his patient alive? If I were writing it, Zach would bitterly choose the latter, and instead of the obvious “I love you / I love you, too” catharsis—which the movie will surely serve up posthaste, like a bowl of warm gruel—he instead comes to understand why his father so often put broader communal responsibilities before his familial ones. Nolan, meanwhile, when told of the situation, would smile wryly at the irony, but ask Hollister to tell Zach that he understood, and that he thought Zach made the right decision. Much would be left unresolved between the two, but at least some sort of understanding would have been achieved, and it all wouldn’t have been so pat.
- There’s follows an excruciatingly long Last Conversation between the two. I think you can figure most of it out. Nolan skipped Mom’s funeral not because he didn’t care, but because he couldn’t face her death. He’s avoided Zach, meanwhile, because he reminds him of her, and he couldn’t bear it, yada yada. Gaak. As you can expect, copious tears are shed, but in the end, years of emotional turmoil is tied up into a nice, neat bow.
- The larger problem is that this goes on so long that I just reached a point where I spontaneously burst into laughter. Nolan’s predicament inevitably called to mind Richard Harris’ ludicrous Death Scene in Tarzan, The Ape Man, which remains perhaps the single funniest such in film history. In that one, he’s Bo Derek’s father, and as an atypically patient Grim Reaper nips off around the corner for a beer or three, Harris proceeds to give forth with an endlessly windy Last Speech, all while impaled though the torso with a large elephant tusk. Admittedly, that one gets extra points for the fact that as he gasps out his never-ending Final Thoughts, a weeping Derek kneels on all fours above him, entirely nude and painted from head to toe with whitewash, expect for her hair and nipples, which have been painted a fetching lime green. She looks like something out of a very special St. Patrick’s Day episode of The Hitchhiker.
- I frankly never thought to see that like of that scene again, but this is pretty damn close. First, of course, Nolan being pinned by the bomb is not entirely different from Harris being transfixed with the tusk. More pertinent, however, is the fact that neither lets their rather improbable circumstances keep them from pontificating to their offspring at farcically excruciating length. I couldn’t tell you the exact second it happened, but after keeping a fairly straight face for several minutes of this, all of the sudden a tipping point was reached and I just started guffawing at my TV set.
- As if this all wasn’t bad enough—and did I mention the grossly saccharine music?—the way it’s played, Hollister, Sam and pretty everyone at the FEMA headquarters are listening in on the conversation!! How the hell thought that was a good idea? Man, if I were talking to someone I loved moments (well, several thousand moments) before their death, I don’t know, I’m not sure I’d want a bunch of other people listening in over the frickin’ speaker phone. And I’m not exaggerating. The reason everyone at HQ is able to listen in is because the call is being played over a PA system!!
- By way, kudos again to Fred Ward. The writing for this scene is almost unbearably awful, but he still somehow comes close to making it work. I hope he got a very, very large check for doing this movie.
- Things finally come to an end when the Big One starts. Despite the fact that the last bomb is at neither armed, or at the proper depth anyway, Sam orders their detonation. Anyhoo, with his dying breath, Nolan goes for the long shot and (duh) manages to press the very last button needed to arm the bomb. “Three points!” he gasps—yeah, we frickin’ get it already—and then makes a very abrupt exit.
- Why, yes, the latest quake does kick off another round of ‘Shout the Numbers!’ Thanks for asking.
- In this case, however, the numbers diminish. The bombs seem to have done their work. Thank goodness for those nuclear warheads! What can’t they do?
- However, since there’s a half hour of movie left, and as the commercial break bumpers showed us mass destruction we haven’t seen yet, I’m assuming there’s more to come.
- Sure enough, as everyone celebrates, Sam stays at her computer and notes Something Ominous. Cut to commercial. This break is quite long, since they probably figured anyone watching at this point would hang around for the big climax. One of the commercials, inevitably, is for the final episode of Friends, which was telecast three days after the second half of this movie. This commercial, unsurprisingly, has played during every single commercial break on both evenings.
- Sam calls the President to tell him that something is still up. Her theory—well, OK, Sam doesn’t formulate theories, she just always knows the score—is that the northern part of the coast is undoubtedly safe now. However, Southern California may still be at risk, since the bomb Nolan armed wasn’t set at the proper depth. You know, this all seems kind of mean, given that Nolan got himself killed to see that the bomb went off.
- Oh, and maybe Sam is just covering her ass, but now she says, “The warhead was only at a depth of two hundred feet or so. It needed to be another two hundred feet down to be optimally effective.” Really? That’ funny, because earlier she told Nolan the bomb had to be set at 324 feet. For a woman’s who has demanded exact precision on this issue, she certainly seems to be playing it loosy-goosey now.
- Sam asks for another 24 hours before people are sent back home. This is so she can “make sure the fault is stable.” Uh, what instrument would tell her that?
- Meanwhile, Zach is predictably unable to walk away from a patient who’s eating up too much of his time. (Which means that two other people probably died in the meantime, which of course no one bothers to mention.) Tying up another plot thread, when confronted about this, Zach shouts, “I just need some help!” At this exact moment, inevitably, Owen comes entering the tent. “I thought you’d never ask,” he quips, as he joins his friend. First, glad you could make it, you selfish, selfish bastard. I hope you enjoyed playing touch football with your kids or whatever the hell you were doing. Second, let’s remember that neither Owen nor Zach is in charge here. I’d have to think Owen would be assigned his own patient rather than being allowed to double up with Zach on one who’s already been occupying a surgeon for five hours.
- In the communications tent, Clark and Amanda are connected to Carla in her hospital room. Tears, etc. Of course, Clark and “have so many things I want to tell you,” and we’re sure the family is on the road to recovery.
- I haven’t been cutting this movie a lot of slack, and I’m not going to apologize for it. However, here they provide what I thought was a pretty neat visual. Sam and Jordan are in a helicopter, flying over a river. They are shocked to realize—well, OK, Sam realizes, because she’s Sam—that it’s flowing the wrong direction. Following the water, they come to a gigantic whirlpool. A shaft has opened up all the way down to a fault, and the entire river is being sucked down into it. This, naturally, confirms Sam’s worse fears. Luckily, Jordan suddenly acts dumber than he has any reason to, so that Sam can spell out how This is Bad & Stuff. Still, that whirlpool is really cool.
- Zoe is manning the computers at headquarters—so…with Sam and Jordan out, the intern is in charge?!—and at Sam’s command, she hits a button on her keyboard. This causes some red arrows to appear over the map on her monitor. “The plates are moving!” Zoe interprets. I’m not sure how a desk computer would tell you all this, but anyway.
- Sam calls the President to rely the bad news. “How big do you think this quake could be?” Hollister asks. “I believe it will change the geography of southern California,” Sam tells him. And all in the next twenty minutes, I guess!
- One last shot of the whirlpool. Goodbye, my friend. In three hours of desultory crap, you were like a beam on sunlight on a cloudy day.
- Sam and Jordan arrive at the Barstow camp and set up a temporary command center. Sam, of course, feels that there should be something else she can do, given that she’s this godlike being and all. Jordan nurtures her in that nauseating Sensitive Guy fashion and tells her that she’s done all she can. Please, please, O Fearsome Jabootu, let these two die a horribly death before this thing is over, I beseech thee.
- Cue the Big Quake, a slew of special effects. There goes the Hollywood sign, some Los Angeles skyscrapers, etc. Most impressively, a gigantic fissure opens up from the ocean and cuts a huge channel through the land. This eventually ends up, of course, cutting through the very middle of the Evac Camp. Again, they only have so much special effects money, so we tend to get short snippets of epic destruction in between lots of slow motion footage of the folks in Barstow screaming and running from stuff and suchlike.
- Presumably many thousands of people, to say the least, die here. However, as usual this aspect is presented in an extremely elliptical fashion.
- Cue one last looong commercial break.
- More slo-mo running and screaming in Barstow. Tents collapse, people sort of, I guess, get swallowed by the earth, and computer graphics follow the gigantic semicircular trench being carved through the heart of California. This goes on for several minutes, during which Zach heroically saves a child (yawn), and the fissure in the camp, filled with ocean water, continues to erode terrain until it looks like Sam and Jordan are goners. Whereupon, if you can believe it, the chasm stops literally two feet from where they lay. Wow, that was too close. Too close to believe, that is. I mean, really.
- The survivors stare in amazement as the quake stops. A broad section of the state has been entirely cut off by the new oceanic passage, is sits off the new coastline as a large island. As some wags have posited, this is thus apparently the same universe that John Carpenter’s Escape from Los Angeles occurs in. Given how good that movie was, I find this theory all too credible.
- “It’s over,” one of Hollister’s aides confirms. “It’s finally over.” Cruelly, he proves incorrect. First, there’s a last swell of Inspiration Music. Then the President gives one last hoary Inspirational Address. “Though this event was a tragedy, it was also a wakeup call. We are not the masters of this planet, we’re just one of the many species [albeit one of the few who have developed nuclear warheads] that have inhabited this place that our ancestors called…Mother Earth. Though our cities and building may fall, as long as we hold true to the virtues sacred to every one of us, as long as we have faith and a will to prevail, we will endure.” Planeteers, the power is yours!!
IMMORTAL DIALOGUE
:
An earthquake rocking Seattle is tracked at the nearby Seismology Institute, in a scene that must have thrilled the Count no end:
Boss Seismologist Dr. Jordan Fisher, ignoring the computer sitting six inches in front of him
: “Where are we?!”
Blonde Guy Seismologist, looking at his own desk computer: “6.5!!”
Asian Seismologist, doing the same: “6.8!!”
Blonde Guy Seismologist: “It’s still climbing! 7.0!!”
Asian Seismologist: “7.4!!”
Blonde Guy: “7.7!!”
Jordan, still the only one not getting the relevant information on his personal desk computer: “Where’s the epicenter?!”
Blonde Guy: “Downtown Seattle!!”
Jordan, finally looking at his computer: “7.9!!”
Things I Learned (Concept courtesy of Andrew Borntreger)
:
- Newspapers and mountain bikes naturally repel each other, like two positive magnets.
- Trying to evade a collapsing building by moving out of the area it’s going to directly fall upon violates the Extreme Sports ethos.
- The chief job of a seismologist is to shout out whatever numbers appear on their PC monitor during an earthquake. A really well-trained team of them, meanwhile, will know when it’s each individual’s turn to yell out a number, so that even though each one of their computers provides the same data at the same moment, you don’t get two of them screaming the figure out at the same time.
- Great leaders always have one moronic dickwad in their circle of advisors, although they also always ignore what he has to say.
- If a man hopes to be romantically involved with a woman, he should always own up and apologize to her when he is wrong, and even more so when he is right. (Actually, I kind of knew that one already.)
- If a guy hasn’t heard about a big news story because he busy performing surgery, it’s evidence that he’s self-centered.
- Earthquakes chase trains.
- If you push a couple of keys on a computer keyboard, they’ll do almost anything.
- Having a crippling fear of reading aloud numbers off a computer screen could destroy your chances at a job in any technical field.
- NBC hasn’t learned much about disaster-themed miniseries since telecasting Atomic Train.
Aftershocks, er, Afterthoughts
:
10.5 is dumb, all right, but really no dumber than its models, the Disaster epics of the ’70s and beyond. Indeed, the screenplay so openly cribs every possible Disaster Movie cliché that the project’s generic dumbness almost seems intentional. (Of course, you could say that about Volcano or The Cassandra Crossing or Twister or several dozen other disaster films, too.)
Events are woefully predictable and quite often ludicrous, such as the scene where the train is destroyed, which manages to be both. Meanwhile, the vast array of thinly etched characters seems to have come pre-assembled from some dusty old Disaster Movie kit. Kim Delaney’s in-your-face hot female seismologist, for example, is unsurprisingly not that different from Anne Heche’s in-your-face hot female seismologist in Volcano. To be fair to Heche, however, she was at least able to project having a sense of humor, something that’s never been Delaney’s forte.
Dialogue remains the film’s cheesy claim to fame, however, with an ongoing string of howling bad lines. Much of this, although not nearly all, has been quoted above. At times this stuff literally had me laughing out loud. Carla’s press conference schmaltz certainly falls into that category, as does Nolan’s never-ending death throes.
To be fair, the pic’s TV audience probably got what they minimally sought from the show. By which I mean, of course, lots of mass destruction. The special effects are decent enough, and occasionally pretty cool. (How they will hold up in digital clarity one the movie hits DVD is another matter.) The lack of carnage, however, remains a problem. It’s certainly tasteful, but in a story that presumably dooms millions of people to horrible deaths, the nearly total paucity of bloodshed emphasizes that one is only watching a movie.
Even so, there are a number of ambitious set pieces. although these are often but briefly portrayed. These, as indicated above, include the destruction of the Space Needle, the swallowing of the train, the fall of the Golden Gate Bridge and the collapse of much of central California into the ocean. Given this, I’m sure the picture will prove a successful video store rental once it hits DVD and cassette, no doubt with “previously unseen footage!!” heavily advertised.
Lest someone think I’ve been overly harsh in my comments, they should check out the uniformly scathing reviews from the nation’s TV critics. Tim Goodman, perhaps having a personal axe to grind—he writes for the San Francisco Chronicle—obviously enjoyed hacking away at a film he describes as “so phenomenally bad it borders on spoofed genius.” Even more amusingly, he assembles rules for the 10.5 Drinking Game, although following them would probably kill most people. Meanwhile, the venerable Tom Shales of the Washington Post described the project as a “laughable gas-bag.”
Sites dedicated to earthquakes, such as Earthquake Country, responded to the film’s factual inanities quickly. Their list of the picture’s scientific gaffes is must-read material. For instance, it turns out that Barstow is 2,000 feet above sea level. Thus the entire climax, featuring a chasm cutting through the area that instantly fills with seawater, is utterly impossible. A general list of articles pertaining to the film’s flaws, both artistic and technical, can be found here.
In the end, there’s really no other way to say it: 10.5 is no great shakes.
********
Postscript: 10.5 was NBC’s most highly rated movie in five years.
