This evening, giving in to my love of cheesy disaster movies, I tuned in to “10.5” on NBC.
Ugh.
From the very beginning I knew this was going to be bad. The opening scenes of a bike courier speeding through the streets of Seattle while everything about him is destroyed was enough to make me wince — why didn’t he stop riding and wait for the shaking to stop? Oh, and, with all the masonry falling about him, how in the hell did he manage to keep riding, unobstructed by debris (or cars)?
Really, really bad.
Then once the movie started in earnest, the sickening shaking continued, but not from seismic activity. Oh, no. The brain trust that made this movie decided, for what I assume are “artistic” purposes, to use a cinema verite style of camera work that makes me sick to my stomach. The camera moves back and forth, and worse — zooms in and out. Constantly. It makes NYPD Blue look like a locked off security camera by comparison.
And does anyone really believe that the USGS has stylish computers that give live readouts of earthquake magnitudes as they happen? And the magnitude, as far as I know, doesn’t increase the longer the quake rumbles.
Well, it’s only TV. There’s no basis in science.
Oh, and it is telling that this over-hyped miniseries with all it’s pricey (yet still unconvincing) special effects is not even presented in high definition. Guess they realized it had no chance of an airing again in the future, so why bother?
It didn’t take me long to change the channel, and I found a fascinating documentary (in high def, of course) on PBS, detailing the rise of communications technology from telegraph wires to fiber optics. It was fascinating to learn how fiber was invented and how it works. Physics is cool. I guess some TV has a scientific basis, eh?
