There is nothing like the greatest natural disaster in human history to inspire people to air their petty grievances.
In the NBC earthquake howler “10.5,” big mutha boneshakers are moving from Seattle southward. The Space Needle has fallen, and Southern California, where they make dramatically and scientifically absurd mini-series, is about to slide into the sea.
So naturally, the bratty teenage daughter of the California governor thinks the time is right to settle scores with her absentee dad; the maverick seismologist played by Kim Delaney has to gripe about being passed over for promotion; and an L.A. doctor must keep calling his father to try to get him to admit he has “avoidance” issues.
That his dad is the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency trying to save 50 million lives is less important to the lad than trying to score a pop psychology breakthrough.
Now would be a good time to point out that “avoidance” is the perfect word to use in discussing “10.5,” an effort (8 p.m. Sunday and Monday, WMAQ-Ch. 5) that is earth-shakingly bad, but, sadly, not worth recommending even as schlock. Or afterschlock.
On the West Coast, they’re taking this all rather seriously, laboring to point out that the movie’s notion of chain-reaction earthquakes that would narrow the mainland U.S. is baseless. They add that — plot revelation warning — the maverick Delaney character’s maverick fix, underground nuclear explosions, would likely do more to cause an earthquake than to stop one.
Here in the Midwest, though, we can be less concerned about getting sucked into the Pacific and more about being suckered into an epic time-wasting event.
There’s nothing so good as a bad disaster movie, but this one, for all the determined camera shaking and model train and bridge breaking, is way too intent on personal bickering among characters you wish would fall into the abyss already, too lackadaisical in the writing, the filming, the acting and the effects.
Sure, you could build a drinking game around the many times one character issues patently false reassurance to another, and you would get very drunk indeed. But it would be, by the end of “10.5,” an angry, embittered kind of drunk.
It’s too bad, because, as many of its specifics show, this could have been a camp classic:
– As President Beau Bridges learns of the crisis, he determines it needs a public face. He decides, in what the script treats as a daring gesture, that it’ll be his old buddy Roy Nolan (Fred Ward). Later, we learn that Nolan is not a country lawyer or even the Education Secretary. He is the head of FEMA.
– A child character actually says, “I just hope the ground stops shaking so dad can come home.”
– Earthquakes seem to disrupt the space-time continuum. At one moment during the film, it’s nighttime in Washington state, but late afternoon down the coast in California. Similarly, Nolan seems to be in Washington, D.C., in one scene, Los Angeles in the next.
– The California governor decides to hold her news conference on the quakes in San Francisco.
– In perhaps the cruelest practical joke ever perpetrated by a nation, the government sets up an “evacuation camp” for people fleeing the coast right on a major earthquake fault. Another fault runs exactly along a train-track line, even as it curves, so that we can see the train trying to outrun the split in the earth behind it.
– The movie has TV news spell the state of military control in California “Marshal law,” apparently thinking it has something to do with the U.S. Marshals service. With this movie, though, you can’t be sure the writers weren’t thinking the term derived from the Marshall Plan and misspelled even their misconception.
– In the president’s speech to the nation, he neglects to tell the people exactly why he is evacuating California or what he wants them to do.
– Current technology, in the filmmakers’ view, does not allow the military to drill more than one deep hole simultaneously.
– As California threatens to rupture and people flee willy-nilly, a reporter goes on TV and says, “Resources appear to be strained.” Credibility too.
It is in yet another of the false reassurance scenes, though, that a character delivers the perfect motto for this movie. Says a mother to her worried child, “You just forget about what you saw on TV.”
There’s nothing shaky about that logic.
