Viewed in
2010
Formats
HD cable TV
Premise
John Cusack tries to survive a world epically obliterated by some epic computer graphics.
Loved
Some really cool CGI.
Liked
Some of the cheesy performances.
Hated
The two hour and forty minute length time, and pretty much everything else.
Thoughts
Amazing how little needs to be said about such a long movie.
The only reason to watch this is for the very impressive/expensive computer graphics in the action pieces. Most of the carnage looked really nice, and the epic destruction of Los Angeles was mind-boggling awesome.
There were some decent performances by the cast; they knew how to ham it up. It was amazing to see how easily John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Woody Harrelson pulled this stuff off on auto-pilot.
The flaws were the flaws you expect: second-rate dialogue, predictable scenes, pace-killing subplots, boring characters, dumb things happening just to elongate a scene, etc.
Despite its numerous problems, it was probably one of the best "disaster porn" films ever made, simply because of the excellent special effects.
What I would change
Taken out the entire conspiracy setup at the beginning, because it was redundant, and took away from John Cusack's character. This schlock could have have been 40 minutes shorter and still would have felt too long.
