WatchingInPerth ....is the last line that Dr Earl Hill/Frank Langella utters in this saga. And therein lies the best way to sum up this telemovie that is catastrophic, but for all the wrong reasons.Pity he didn't pay more attention to it when he read this thing & agreed to do it!Apparently, more lines are required to make this review valid! Really? What else is there to say? Not bad enough to be "so bad, it's good". Every clichéd piece of dialogue that has ever graced a bad telemovie, gathered together & trotted out one after the other. Is that enough now??!!!

MartianOctocretr5 Gets a couple of points for the laugh-at-it value.It picks up a few minutes after the end of the first installment. A major earthquake has just annihilated part of southern California, clear out to Barstow, with millions of casualties. We see some guys in Vegas, only 150 miles from Barstow, who would have certainly felt such an immense quake; and witnessed news coverage of it. What are they doing? Preparing for a possible danger to Vegas? Mourning the victims of the disaster? No, they're playing poker. The father of the heroine in both movies is winning, so that must be why he's not concerned with his daughter's fate much.That's only the beginning. We see President Bo Bridges, still looking like he's suffering stomach wall spasms (like in the first movie). The scientist girl goes to discover more seismic problems are coming. Then an inconsiderate quake interrupts her dad's poker game. This opens the obligatory Poseidon Adventure rip off sequence, complete with all the disaster movie trimmings: arguing, wrecked staircases, aftershocks at just the wrong moment, panicky person gets killed, one of the rescuers is related to one of the fleeing survivors, etc.Then the scientists watch as a major fault cuts across the heartland. Good special effects here, but the story line remains ludicrous. What's right in the way of the fault? A nuke power plant, what else. And so it goes.Outrageous, but fun.

AvdW I always watch disaster movies, but 9 out of 10 they turn out to be disasters themselves. This movie was no exception to that rule. The story is simple (as it should be): Mother Earth shows her wrath and has no mercy doing it. The president of the US (who else, as no other country seems to be affected — Hawaii being the US) takes charge and assembles a team of experts to tell what is going on and provide a solution to the problem. No complaints from me there. But why oh why does the daughter of the president have to happen to assist the doctor who treats the wife of the FEMA rescuer who saves his own wife who happens to be in the same building as the father of the scientist in charge who happens to be the discredited geologist who happens to have the 'solution' (no spoiler intended), all supervised by the daughter of the FEMA director who happens to be in direct contact with the president (to come full circle)? To cut it short: suspension of disbelieve is not something thought about thoroughly by the filmmakers.But that's story wise; in a disaster movie you expect disaster to take place, and indeed is does. The special effects and computer graphics are good (for a TV movie at least). No cardboard boxes, or Styrofoam walls flying around (not too obviously anyway), and the CGI is up-to-date. But then again the story line (or rather the suspension of disbelieve) cuts in: the imagery on the computer screens at the geological crisis center are good quality, but unrealistic; the distance people and helicopters are maneuvering from exposed lava or occurring earthquakes is sheer impossible; not to mention the small amount of people that apparently are actually caught in the disaster (admittedly, the number of extras swarming the make-shift medical rescue centers is impressive).Overall the movie shows rather realistic disasters, but that is all it does. There's no real science in the movie, there's no real personal drama (should I care for a person just because he/she is introduced to me?), and there is no satisfactory ending (yeah, yeah, we shall overcome …).

cvoci-1 Absolutely bombastic waste of time. Both 10.5 movies are so over the top it takes away any credibility. The sequel where the US is split in half is so ridiculous...obviously a geological event like this would have world wide ramifications and this wasn't shown. These 2 movies are 8 hours of torture. If this is on, run away from the TV screaming! The producers and writers should be flogged for doing a movie like this; it's only nice to destroy the US? This is the same kind of junk like the remake of the Andromeda Strain, TV show 24, etc, with characters and plots so caught up in their own self importance.If you want to watch better campy disaster movies, look at Earthquake (1974) or the Towering Inferno (1974) and other 1970's Irwin Allen pictures. At least those absurdities are entertaining, well cast and don't take themselves so serious.