This is a review of the 3 hour miniseries version, rather than the heavily edited 100 minute cut. I had originally only planned to watch Part 1 today, but I was sucked in and quickly put on Part 2. That has to say something. The film certainly grabbed me, but I must admit to being a sucker for disaster movies. It had all the twists and turns you would expect. Cruel public officials, broken marriages, scientists deemed crackpots turning out to be right all along. With three hours to get through, it certainly covers all the angles. After a storm hits Scotland, it soon becomes apparent that the storm will sweep along the east coast of England and eventually flood London. The cast is varied from bad roles and bad performances, bad roles but good performances, and passable roles good performances. Carlyle and Gilsig are the usual divorced couple, forced back together by this natural disaster. Courtenay is Carlyle's estranged father, they are also forced back together due to the flood, as they all happen to work within the parameters of the same field. Most notable are smaller performances from Nigel Planer as the head of the MET office who failed to predict the storm. He feels genuine grief over the tragedy he could have helped avoided and an early performance by Tom Hardy. He is the only real person that feels human throughout. He has some completely unrelated dialogue regarding his mates and a dog. It is perhaps the only time we hear somebody talk about something other than the weather. Seeing a big disaster in England is a welcome change and the effects were actually quite good. The film does have many flaws though. It is incredibly predictable and the bulk of dialogue is exposition or corny family feuds. The editing is annoying, as it constantly freezes and shows us the time, or flashes back to something we saw just minutes a go. The music is very repetitive. I had the main 'dramatic' tune down within 3 minutes (no exaggeration). Towards the end of the second part, all the real threat is over with and they spend a good forty minutes unflooding London. This makes for a film that has reached its climax much earlier. However, if you like seeing disaster films just to see how different parts of the government would react, this is mostly competent.

"Global warming is killing us all!". This is of course despite the fact that not a shred of concrete evidence supports this flawed "theory". Lets all face it people, you simply can't take 100 years out of billions of years geological history and come to the conclusion that the climate is changing because of any minor influences. Do people pollute? Sure they do. Are we raping the planet of natural resources? Probably. Are we significantly changing the climate? Probably not, since the geological record shows far greater climate changes than we have experienced in the last 1000 years. A single solar flare has more control over the climate than we do. A meteorite causes more changes in an afternoon than man has caused in his entire time on the planet. A volcano causes more rapid and lasting climate changes in 30 minutes than man causes in 200 years. So why do these liberal idiots keep pushing this asinine idea? So they can get lucrative government grants to "study" this "phenomenon". The real study should be done on the ignorant saps that ACTUALLY believe these fantastical stories. 20,000 years ago the last ice age peaked. I suppose that was due to the major influence of spear chucking savages driving around gas guzzling SUV mastodons? Wake up people. You are sheep who will believe anything.Oh, and the movie sucked.

My overall comment? Editing: POOR. VFX: OK (not bad). Acting: not bad. script/idea: not badThe editing of this movie is obviously POOR. It cannot communicate to the audiences. The transition of scenes, the length of scenes are inappropriate. It's a bit boring actually. The story goes almost all the way the audiences would expect. The background music is also re-used several times throughout the movie, as though they only have a couple of pieces available.The visual effects is OK, acceptable, but nothing very surprising. The waves themselves are OK, but the way they blend with still water (when the waves are coming) is poor. It's obvious that they just rendered a wave layer and put it on top of an image with still water, instead of rendering the entire stuff in one piece.The story itself is not bad, up to standard. But the way the editing is done really downgrades the entire piece. It's obvious they wanna reproduce a UK version of a flood film from those US ones, but they can't get as good.It's an average movie, not bad after all. But don't expect a Hollywood class one, you'll be very disappointed.

This film is striking for its opening sequence of a flash flood in Scotland, especially after seeing footage of what happened in Galveston, Texas, with Hurrican Ike just now. It unfortunately goes downhill from there. It might as well have been set in the XIXth century for all the realism of the weather-predicting techniques. For the last 10 years at least, the paths of hurricanes have been highly predictable a week ahead of time thanks to probability analysis. Even your local weather channel is a better predicting tool than anything imagined in this film. That part is laughable. Unfortunately, so is the drama element which is redolent of the worst soap-opera (read: hormonal) hysterics on record on both sides of the Atlantic. Failed marriages, missing children, the usual vaginal yearnings, you get the idea... How bad is it? It makes "The Day After Tomorrow" look like an undiscovered play by Henrik Ibsen. I find particularly offensive that this film depicts the lives of millions of Londoners depending on the whims of a single powerful woman with gonads the size of weather balloons surrounded by menzipoo wimps. On the plus side, the destruction of London by tidal wave (and CGI) is sort of cool at times, if you like that sort of thing. Action scenes are powerful if a little confused. The British actors are competent but lack charisma. The whole production, while infinitely better than any made-for-TV American entertainment of the same ilk, tries to embrace too much, Eastenders, Coronation Street and "Titanic" all rolled into one, and fails. The film's cardinal sin is that the talkiest scenes sound and look like cost-cutting time-fillers. The trendy blue-green colour scheme and the vaguely Celtic wailings of the soundtrack are the last word in oblivion-bound film-making.