I’m continuing my series of film reviews for movies that are available on Netflix Canada. I watch a lot of it since I’ve signed up, and I’ll share my thoughts here.

2012: Ice Age, directed by Travis Fort continues the long line of movies that are made to capitalize on another movies marketing expenditures by making a similar film, but with a fraction of the budget. Much like Asteroid, which was released following Armageddon and Deep Impact, 2012: Ice Age tries to cozy itself up to 2012 (the one with John Cusack) and The Day After Tomorrow (the one with Jake Gyllenhaal). It’s main failing, I suppose, is that it didn’t cast a lead actor with an equally famous sister.

I’m kidding. It’s main failing was it’s plot, casting, acting, budget, and special effects.

Seriously gang, this movie is bad. I watching from end to end, and it never paid off. I mean, this movie is in the same category as The Beast (William Peterson vs a giant squid, by the way, is only a little bit better because of his stint on CSI).

2012: Ice Age’s plot is that a series of volcanoes in the north Atlantic dislodge a giant glacier from, I dunno, Greenland I guess, and send it racing down the eastern seaboard at two-hundred miles an hour, destroying everything in it’s path. A scientist (is he a geologist? A meteorologist? It’s never clearly explained…) races to save his family by taking them from Maine to New York and ultimately… New Jersey.

As he’s driving, Boston is destroyed. The United States tries to obliterate the glacier with nuclear weapons, they fail, and millions more die. Off camera, of course.

It also snows a lot because glaciers are made of ice, so a glacier racing around in the summer would make it snow. Bill Nye’s tears made up a large percentage of the ice in this giant evil glacier. A good 75% of this film is obscured by computer generated snow falling in front of the screen, and the film demonstrates how impossibly cold it is outside by having one actor wear a toque. The rest of them don’t even do up their coats. 

Ugh, I can’t even go on. Here’s the trailer:

Do not be fooled, the trailer is exciting and campy. This movie is neither. It is ripe for riff-trax/mst3k. I give it 0.5 Robot Jox’s out of 5.