Remember when on rabbi-ear TV it showed TV movies? I think "10.5: Apocalypse" was the last ones to show on network TV & there's a good reason why. (Only those Hallmark-type TV movies seem to appear these days.) 1st of all, where do I start w/ what sucks about "10.5: Apocalypse"? Is it having a trombonist as a cameraman? Has-been actors Kim Delaney or Dean Cain being the most recognizable in the cast? ("NYPD Blue" & "Lois & Clark" seem to be the zeniths in their respective careers.) Is it the fact that an earthquake moves like Bugs Bunny stopping & making a left turn around the nuclear power plant & is depicted as an actual lava chasm that gets more powerful as the Richter scale increases? Or is it the tiresome depiction of disaster film characters, from the determined band of survivors who get picked off 1-by-1 when necessary w/ the tiresome backstories & subplots that are meant for you 2 give a damn about 'em or the government officials, from the fearless leaders like Delaney or the guy who plays her dad, Frank Langella, while the others, including the President himself, are in DC fretting & arguing about how to stop the calamity? "Dammit, that's impossible! We don't got the time!" If I may, I assume they got the money to deploy government or military personnel to stop said calamity since in reality nobody has such a budget, bull or bear market. Let's see. I must start w/ the cinematography, & then special effects, than characters & plot. 1st off, the back-&-forth filming of "10.5: Apocalypse" is just godawful, plane & simple. I actually was getting nauseous watching every damn scene zoomed in & out, even during scenes of heavy dialogue like among the government workers. This may be okay for a 8-year-old excited to play w/ a camcorder or an 18-year-old making a silly monster movie w/ a 18-year-old's budget & properties. But it's grossly unprofessional to do so in a TV movie, notably w/ multiple cameras. I'm a fan of bad movies, but I don't remember any other movie I've seen in Spanish or any film on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" that had such a sickening feature like the gratuitous zoomin'. If Razzies could be awarded for other categories, I'd give 1 to "Girl In Gold Boots" for Editing, "Hamlet" (the MSTied one) for Art Direction, & "10.5: Apocalypse" for Cinematography. "Manos: the Hands of Fate" should be lucky to be nominated; overzooming is much much worse than having just a 16mm Bell & Howell that films only 32 seconds. What's next? CGI. The special effects were the best, or I should say the most tolerable part of the movie. For a film made in the '00s, CGI's the way to go. But it is a TV movie, so it's nothing like "Lord of the Rings." The plot, lackluster as it is, is quite familiar when it comes to disaster flicks. Some natural disaster or a combination of 'em, like earthquakes in Vegas & the Great Plains or volcanoes in the northwest, threaten to extinguish humanity or something like that, w/ great disregard for basic science. (People dying quickly in a volcanic eruption is a proved fact, though; been like that from Pompeii to Indonesia.) I don't see the big deal out of this. Regardless of deaths on a genocidal scale, seeing new straits & channels carve up California & North America's kinda cool. New maps, yay! I'm a map geek. I'd be interested to see how the newly changed geography changes transportation, economics & politics. Just look at the lighter side of things, a la "This Is the End". Why so serious? Thus bringing me to the characters. While I still know about 5 years worth of Spanish, the acting was rather identical to the over-acting on telenovelas to tell me that these guys were playing it straight like the director's basic instructions was "Think of 9/11! Action!" My apologies, but seeing the President & his crew act like they're learning about New Orleans, Haiti or the 2 tsunamis over the past decade while watching a new map of the US be made is just freakin' ludicrous (although the trombone-cam wasn't just crazier but very distracting). & I may not be keen on politics, but why must we also believe that the President & other government agencies such as FEMA got the whole thing covered? (Take note this was made around the time Katrina did New Orleans; either the producers weren't aware or ignored FEMA's bad publicity.) & when we're not watching President Beau Bridges look sad or frustrated regularly, we must watch the determined band of survivors in Las Vegas. This was pretty much "The Poseidon Adventure" stage of "10.5: Apocalypse." When Vegas sinks, we should have learned enough about these guys to cheer them on as they seek out safety (or cheer after one dies after making bets as to who'd be killed 1st). In conclusion, "10.5: Apocalypse," compared to "The Poseidon Adventure" or "Independence Day" before, or "2012" or "Pacific Rim" afterwards, is very amateurish & is the archetype of TV-movies about disasters that's only seen on Syfy or Unimas. & again, boo to the trombonist director.

This movie is really terrible. It has no redeeming qualities. I didn't see the original 10.5, and I'm not going to after sitting through this mess.Everything's bad: acting, writing, special effects, you name it.But the one thing I absolutely hate about this movie is the camera-work. I think the director of photography has an itchy zoom button finger. The camera keeps zooming in and out, in and out, in and out, etc. If you insist on watching 10.5: Apocalypse, be sure you have Advil and/or a motion sickness bag by your side.Maybe if you and your friends want a bad movie to make fun of, you should check this out. Otherwise, stay away!

I won't belabor the same things that others have said (eg, the headache-inducing zooming, the stiff dialog, the poor special effects, the grade 2 science, etc.) Instead, I want to talk about the unrealistic way most people reacted in this move. Remember 9/11? The country stood still for weeks watching the event on TV. But in this movie entire cities (or states?) are destroyed and most people in the rest of the country act oblivious, still going about their normal lives, like the people in Las Vegas. Or how about the earthquake expert who is on the phone with his daughter and says, "I think we're about to have a big earthquake here in Las Vegas in a few seconds" then calmly gets on an elevator(!) while the tremors are going on around him. (Wouldn't he pull the fire alarm? Or take the stairs? Apparently nobody thought of fire alarms in this movie. Or fires.) Or how about the helicopter pilot who is watching the water spill over the top of Hoover Dam and then decides to get a great picture by flying 50 feet below(!) the peak of the dam. (Even flying 200 feet above the dam would be fatal because when the dam breaks the air currents might sink the copter.) In summary, my main gripe is the totally unrealistic human reactions in this movie. Which, I guess, you could blame on the script writer.

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.