Absolute Zero (2006)

I love this movie so much

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The advertising for this appalling movie claimed that "Millions of years ago, a thriving planet earth was engulfed by a sudden freeze so extreme that it wiped out all forms of life. Plants withered and died, dinosaurs faded into extinction, oceans froze - this was known as the Ice Age and it is on the verge of coming back." The Ice Age was not a single event, did not happen suddenly, was not the cause of the extinction of dinosaurs - and apparently ALL other life on earth - oceans did not freeze, and it was not a state of absolute zero temperatures. They couldn't have been more wrong if they had tried. Ironic that in the movie someone says that science is never wrong.If there was to be a new ice age it would not start in Florida! Perhaps they would have been closer to the truth if they suggested that the big freeze started in the brains of Hollywood directors.

So the graphics and sets are poorly created, the acting is mediocre, the plot is predictable, and the science is childishly inaccurate... but it certainly doesn't deserve a 3/10. If you expect to see cheesy made-for-TV quality, you won't be disappointed, because that was the intent of this movie. Certainly no blockbuster but it's good in it's own way. Essentially, a rogue scientist determines that the magnetic poles are going to shift, resulting in the rapid deep freeze of the equator. Of course, nobody believes him until it's too late. Throw in some romantic tension, angry standoffs, an evil businessman, hero kid, a few death scenes, and a semi-happy ending... bam! A cliché sci-fi movie that can be enjoyed by anyone who can appreciate it for what it is. I would have to agree with most of the opinions not to buy or rent the movie, but if you happen to see it on TV, or flip through and find it on netflix while bored, give it a try. Keep your expectations low, like Battlefield Earth low, and you may actually enjoy it.

I'm not going to talk about the admittedly silly premise of the film, because it happens to be similar to the premise on which Val Guest built "The Day the Earth Caught Fire," a very good sci-fi/disaster anti-nuke drama from the early '60s. Guest demonstrated that the way to deal with a silly 'scientific' premise was to unravel it gradually, having no one accept it on face value, until it could no longer be denied; while concentrating your film-making abilities on the dramatic interaction between well-developed characters, supplying them with a convincing visual backdrop of the world eroding into chaos.Well that certainly doesn't happen in this film. The reason other reviewers can complain about the silly premise is because there isn't really anything else to the film - the characters are flat, the dialog just streams of clichés, the dramatic interaction unbelievable when not completely absent - and the premise itself is handled very badly.That leaves the question of whether the film presents a convincing visual backdrop of the imminent disaster of Miami suddenly freezing over. Question? actually, it's a joke.Here's the tell-all moment about the budgeting of the film and the incompetence with which it is made - I think it half, but I remember the percentage higher, of the shots used to depict the effect of Miami's freezing and the response of the population there are localized on a single hotel swimming pool. That's right, a swimming pool, and a rather small one (low budget hotel for a low budget movie). The 20 or 30 people around it (popular swimming pool!) are swimming or lying around on deck chairs - then the camera shakes, and people get out of the water and people fall into the water and the camera shakes some more and people run around and scream - cut to CGI of birds eye view of Florida freezing over, cut to swimming pool cut to a small bit of beach front with obvious fake snow on it, back to the swimming pool, cut to the central characters trying to find each other through cell phones, then back to the swimming pool - it was amusing until it became patently obvious that the film-makers didn't care about their movie, didn't care to entertain their audience, only cared about getting paid for filling up a time-slot on a cable TV channel....I admit that the first half of the film, particularly the episodes in the Antarctic are fairly well handled for a B-movie. But Once the film returns to Miami for the remainder, it sinks to a level of casual incompetence that only television allows for.Not even a decent time-waster; I stayed just to see how dumb it could get. It gets pretty dumb, believe me.

I watched this movie prepared to see some incorrect science for the sake of entertainment, but what I saw was NO correct science. Well, except for the part where absolute zero is -273 Celsius. That's the only thing they did get right.The fact that almost all the characters repeatedly say, "Science is never wrong", when the science in this movie is always wrong, must be a joke the writers played on the producers.The whole premise of this movie is that the Earth's magnetic field rotates 90 degrees in less than 5 hours, and this causes everything at the equator to cool down to -273 Celsius (absolute zero). That makes as much scientific sense as your dog freezing solid because he turned around counter-clockwise before lying down, instead of clockwise.The "scientists" in the movie even did a small-scale demonstration of this (before the disaster), by artificially rotating the magnetic field of a room full of plants. The whole room and the plants in it reached -273 Celsius. Rubbish.All the other science in this movie that follows and supports this idea is either flawed, or outright wrong. They even got wrong the conversion of temperatures between Celsius and Fahrenheit on the status display they kept showing.Not only is the science wrong in this movie, but there is a lack of internal consistency in the movie. For example, it's -170 Celsius outside, but people in a glass-walled building are wearing summer clothes and are not cold. It was previously established that a blast of cold air from the sky will freeze solid everything in an area, but a similar blast only freezes a vehicle and its driver, but not the little girl standing a few metres from the blast. The people in bikinis around a Miami pool don't notice anything wrong until it starts snowing, despite a temperature drop of 30 Celsius before the snow started falling.The characters are all clichés, and even taking that into account, they sometimes do things that don't make common sense.Yeah, I watched the movie for it's entertainment value. For the disaster. I'm used to suspending disbelief, and going with the flow of a movie in order to enjoy it. When a movie lacks internal consistency and basic common sense, that's just too much BAD for me.