10.5 DVD > Reviews > Did the earth move for you?

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Liked it
Story	Good
Characters / Performances	Satisfactory
Special Effects	Good
Soundtrack	Good

Advantages:	Quite entertaining . Some good effects .
Disadvantages:	Perhaps not entertaining enough

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

We do seem to enjoy a good disaster. Provided it is some place else and we can watch the drama whilst sitting comfortably at home with a drink and perhaps a pizza. Trains, planes, ships, volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, all come in for the film treatment. Some films do contain a high degree of factual truth and others do not.

10.5 or Earthquake,10.5 as it was known here in the U.K. was a mini series that was shown on TV in May 2004. The opening sequence is of a major quake hitting the city of Seattle whilst a rider on a mountain bike dodges the falling bits and pieces and the broken ground. This at once tells you that when you want to escape a major earthquake, don't think about a car, take a mountain bile instead.

O.K. so factual accuracy is not one of the major points of this film, but then when did facts matter for a good story. As long as it makes for a dramatic picture, who cares? The shear force of a Richter 10 or larger earthquake could possibly be felt clear across the continent of America.

The Richter scale is a way of measuring earthquakes. We will have heard it mentioned on news programmes. But do we really understand what it means?

Let's put that in some sort of perspective. The scale is logarithmic. That means that a 1 is ten times more powerful than a 0 and so on up the scale. So a Richter 6 is equivalent to a one megaton explosion. 1 mega ton is 1,000,000 metric tons of TNT. A Richter 10 is about 1,000,000 times larger, 1 Teraton or 1,000,000,000,000 metric tons of TNT. The Nagasaki nuclear bomb was only a Richter 5 or 32 kilotons and even the 2004 Indian ocean seaquake was a Richter 9 or 32 gigatons. By comparison Chernobyl was only Richter 3.5 or 178 metric tons.

So you will see that we are talking about forces that we can barely imagine. So any film that is talking about a 10.5 is using forces that can tear the side of a continent without working up a sweat!

As we are all aware the west coast of America is on a fault zone, the Pacific Ring of Fire. This is where the Pacific Plate is sliding past the North American Plate. The Pacific is moving roughly North East and the American South West. The American Plate also appears to be leaning on the Pacific plate somewhat. This has created the famous or infamous San Andreas fault and its related fault zones. It has been a popular misconception that when the "Big One" strikes a large portion of California will sink below the waves. As these plates are moving relative to each other this is not likely.

So we have the premise for this film. Earthquakes of increasing magnitude start to hit the west coast. Can anything be done?

Some of the special effects of disaster on a large scale are rather good. The model and miniature work is very credible. There were at least two occasions when I knew that it was model work. There is some CGI work as well. Perhaps not as much as would normally be seen in a studio block buster but as this was made as a TV series they have done rather well.

As I do not normally take much notice of the names of the various actors in films and TV productions I am not best qualified to rate their performances against other works. I can only rate this one.

The name I recognise is that of Beau Bridges. It may not be a particularly famous name though he has done quite some film work. Here he is playing a President who has to manage this disaster.

Kim Delaney would appear to have been in NYPD Blue and The O C. neither of which I have watched so I cannot comment on her performance there. Here she is playing a scientist who has certain controversial theories. She may be considered as over controlled. I would put her performance as believable without being too strenuous.

Dule Hill would appear to have done some film and TV work previously and has appeared in "The West Wing" subsequently to this film. Here he is playing a doctor. He does quite well, though I feel it is rather a clichéd performance.

Fred Ward. Here is a fine character actor. You may recall him from the' Tremors 'films and a film 'Remo Williams' in 1985. I had seen these films but did not remember this actor until I looked him up.

In fact there are rather a large number of clichéd performances here. But overall I do not think they detract from the overall effect. We have the widowed father at odds with his son. The divorced father taking his daughter out for a camping trip. The scientist with a controversial theory that nobody believes. The husband arguing with his wife over a car. Presidential advisors who are not happy with a proposed action.

The direction was by John Lafia. I do not know his works but there were places where I just wished that the camera had stayed in one place. I know that the ground moves during an earthquake and that lots of fast panning shots can represent panic, but I do not think he needed to go quite that far.

A full list of cast and crew is available at IMDB

It would seem that this has been generally panned by critics. There are a lot of factual inaccuracies in it. But as entertainment it is entertaining. We do not always look for factual accuracy in our watching. It would appear that they had a budget of $20 million and this was viewed by some 20 million viewers in the U.S.A. So it could not have been all that bad.

This was a made for television and in some places it shows. There are places where the screen blacks out on what would have been commercial breaks and at the end of a particular episode. These have been removed from this film. There are places where they have used the technique of multiple shots on different sized screens. This is not something that can work well on very large screens, however on a TV or DVD sized screen you have a more intimate picture and the procedure seems to work.

Overall this is a fast paced film. The tension is built up quite well and though it does tend to lapse rather at one point, it recovers quite well to a rather spectacular finish. The background music was not too obtrusive. There was one point where I felt it could have been quieter but that is only me. On the whole you tend not to notice the music which is how it should be. It is there to add to the drama of a situation rather than being all over it. There is one point where all background sound is cut off and a vocal performance is playing against a background of chaotic action. This I have seen done before in some other films either with an orchestral or vocal performance. When done well it can add to the overall effect. This was adequate rather than superb.

This disc is Region 1 coded so you will need a universal player to play this. It was a straight to video release and was shown on British television as a mini series.

Run time 165 mins.
Region: Region 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number of discs: 1
DVD Release Date: 24 Aug 2004
ASIN: B0002DB5B8
Extras: none
The menu only has play, scene selection and sound set up.

I have not seen this available in U.K. shops and only through Amazon, marketplace from American suppliers. I paid £4.77 plus postage.

Last words.
This is not going to appeal to everybody, unless they are the type of persons who have to have a copy of every work that a particular actor/actress has made, even the not so good ones.
This probably will appeal to those who like a good disaster film. It is better than some and worse than others, but is a very entertaining example of the genre. On the whole I did rather enjoy this film.

I do not know if it will be released for U.K. You may want to wait and hire a copy if or when it does come out or else get a second hand copy cheap.

I have put this review under Film Only due to the lack of any extras with this disc.