Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 00:14:34 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>,
        WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Movie complaint
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

At 1/23/2006 10:28 PM, Eric Jablow wrote:
>John Derbyshire, of "National Review Online", has this
>complaint about a current film:

Sounds like a good one to miss!

If anyone hasn't seen the latest Sci-FI channel picture, "Magma: Volcanic
Disaster" (http://www.scifi.com/magma/), don't bother.  (skip now if you
don't want spoilers for this...)

The acting is nothing to write home about, but adequate, and the
cinematography is likewise uninspired but workmanlike...it's the writing
and set design that makes this one an embarrassment.  The writing is
childish, the science is ludicrous, the set designer apparently did
research by watching old Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea and Lost In Space
shows...he certainly didn't use anything real, and the model makers think
the Navy labels their subs the way NASA labels Space Shuttles.  On top of
those sins, it has the gall to be preachy and pretentious.  Its message is
as likely to be heeded as menu instructions from a 400 lb dietician.

If the science wasn't so abominably ridiculous it might *almost* be
possible to forgive its other flaws, but it's really bad.  We see things
like a team of vulcanologists swallowed by lava from a sudden eruption in
Iceland since there was no clue that the volcano they were not only camped
out on but actively studying with deployed instruments was about to explode
and gush lava.  If stealth magma wasn't bad enough, they called for
emergency helicopter evacuation, were told that it would be 5 minutes until
the chopper, which hadn't yet taken off, would be there...but in the next
scene they were listed as "missing" as if it was a mystery what had
happened to them.  There was no explanation as to why the helicopter crew
failed to report an active volcano at the pickup site, why this didn't make
the news at all, and why the second team of vulcanologists who visited the
area shortly after didn't notice any signs of a recent eruption or even
seem to be aware that there had been one (they said the last eruption was
700 years ago).  I guess they were too busy using Ammonite fossils
discovered on the inner surface of the cinder cone to date the time of the
last eruption of their own chosen volcano (which erupted and had them
calling for the same helicopter evac...also there in 5 minutes from the
first radio call).  I guess the writer had heard that sea-bottom fossils
are sometimes found on mountain tops, but can't tell the difference between
a mountain pushed up by plate collision and a volcano's cinder cone.

It keeps getting worse, even if you don't know anything about geology or
paleontology in particular.  Volcanoes all over the planet start erupting
and the main characters, of course, have a poo-poo'd theory that explains
it all, but the snotty government scientist/bureaucrats won't listen.  They
go to South America (in what appears to be their own executive jet) to
gather evidence, and lose a member in a deep copper mine when one tunnel,
which they are in though it doesn't appear on their map, turns out to be a
"lava tube", and the lava comes back before they can get out.  Meanwhile,
the main character's estranged wife is working in Yellowstone as a park
ranger, and Old Faithful has stopped working...which isn't unreasonable
under the circumstances, but when things go totally haywire later, it only
consists of a few geysers spewing lava rather than steam...not the whole
super-volcano that Yellowstone is sitting in going off.  I guess it decided
to leave the erupting to the other 1500 volcanoes around the world.

Their theory as to what caused all this odd behavior?  That man has caused
this by spreading radioactivity over the surface of the planet, causing the
core to expand.  There's an analogy about a burritto indigestion problem
that makes as much sense as the rest of it.

There's a plan to fix it all of course.  The idea, related after a speech
about how nasty humans have treated the planet to cause this (one of
several preachy sections), is to relieve the pressure by setting off atomic
bombs (wasn't radioactivity the problem?) along sub-sea fault lines.  So we
see submarines (with big "UNITED STATES NAVY" lettering down the sides and
lots of Plexiglass situation plotter boards mounted vertically in the very
large control room and windows used to look out at the problem) firing
nuclear-tipped torpedoes into the sides of the Marianas Trench...followed
by whole arrays of submarines...from all the countries of the world, in
hand-holding cooperation using their own fleets of nuclear submarines to do
the same.  Our sub in the Atlantic, which is doing the same thing there,
gets caught in a landslide since they apparently can't fire torpedoes from
100' farther up where they wouldn't have been in whatever trench caved in
on them.  This is not a problem, as the most annoying supporting character
is on it at the time and at least we don't have to hear his ridiculous
dialog anymore.

The movie ends with more preachiness and a view from space of a globe with
changed coastlines for Europe and North America, though Greenland, the
middle east, India, Japan, etc. all seem unchanged.

Blech.

-- Mike B.