The TV mini-series is usually a dubious proposition, and a good way to find out in advance whether time invested watching a particular one would be time wasted is to check YouTube: the more postings ridiculing the mini-series, the bigger the swerve is recommended.
Predictably, TV2's 10.5 Apocalypse (Monday and last night, 8.30pm) has several postings.
It's another of those mega-disaster stories designed to scare the bejesus out of us about forces of nature against which we are powerless - in this case, plate tectonics.
Thankfully, unlike a similarly histrionic mini-series on the super- volcano under Yellowstone Park, 10.5 Apocalypse was based not on geological fact, but on someone's flight of fancy.
In a nutshell, the world's continents, having stayed separate and well-distanced for a millennium or two, have now taken it upon themselves to start moving back together.
Why? Don't be picky.
Some commentators thought - hoped? - that 9/11 would discourage movie-makers from the glorying-in-mass-gore disaster movies like this.
If anything, there have been more of them, even several about 9/11, and subsequent natural disasters, notably the tsunami, have only sharpened the appetite of movie-makers and audiences. There have even been two remakes of The Poseidon Adventure, for pity's sake.
What this says about us, who lap them up, is somewhat depressing. To take the prissy view, we're quite happy to have the plight of large groups of people, be they struck by tsunamis, earthquakes or terror attacks, turned into entertainment.
To be a little more balanced, some of these shows enhance our awareness and empathy. Bluntly, 10.5 Apocalypse is not one of those.
It's been a mammoth schlock- fest, with special effects so obviously computer-generated that any self-respecting teenage computer hobbyist would sneer.
The deal is this: sundry earthquakes start disrupting life in the United States, so the president - a chubby-chopped Beau Bridges – calls in two special geo-brainiacs, Dr Samantha Hill and Dr Jordan Fisher.
The Hoover Dam bursts, killing him before the end of part one. She goes on to glory, including proving that the crackpot theory conceived by her brilliant geo-brainiac father – about the continents deciding to cosy up again – is correct.
Woven through the story are the president's simpering daughter, who has taken a gap year to work for the Red Cross, engaging in sundry heroics at disaster sites, and a couple of firefighting brothers engaging in pathetic sibling rivalry while engaging in sundry heroics at disaster sites.
One of the brothers was played by Dean Cain, who used to be Superman on telly, which made things extra confusing, as your subliminal thought was, Why didn't he just find a phone box, get his kit on and save the world all by himself?
Some viewers may have got through the resultant cliche- uttering by pretending that the incompetent and platitudinous American president portrayed here was George W Bush. But, as one online reviewer has pointed out, a president of his Texan lineage would hardly have ordered the detonation of oil fields, geological imperatives notwithstanding.
Other cynical viewers would have polished their liberal consciences on the idea that the Earth's plates had decided to rearrange themselves so as to bisect the North American continent, wiping out much habitable land and therefore voters. There might be an argument for intelligent design right there.
But for most of us, the only consolation were the moments of unintentional hilarity.
For instance, a great rift opens along a main highway, and instead of doing what any sensible motorist would do - turn the car around and drive like hell in the other direction - the motorists concerned stand either side of the chasm arguing about how they are going to get to their appointments, with law enforcement operators standing by discussing this with them.
Naturally, the thickos are stunned and hysterical when the hole begins to grow, swallowing them and their cars. Hard, too, to take seriously the bit where the killer quakes hit Vegas, where Dr Hill's discredited but brilliant father has been gambling his life away since other geologists ridiculed his theory.
There were odd flashes of superior sci-fi, such as the scene in which a ranch-hand on an arid farm, worried about his suddenly nervous horse, becomes aware that he is ankle-deep in water, and the desert plain is rapidly moving.
But mostly, 10.5 Apocalypse was like 24, without the benefit of agent Jack Bauer, with a much less credible plot, and with a ton of schmaltz added.
Agent Bauer would have been setting bombs, downing terrorists, intuiting new threats to the president's life and reassuring his daughter by satellite link all at the same time.
But this hero, Dr Sam Hill, had time while the US was turning into a giant gruyere cheese, to surf the Net, reminiscing about the career of her famous father, allowing her chin to quiver a little and her eyes to go all misty.
Then, there was another warning indicator about this silly show - it was made by Hallmark.
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