Syfy's '2012 Ice Age' - An Observation or Review


The Saturday Night movie on the Syfy channel was 2012: Ice Age.  It stars Patrick Labyorteaux, Julie McCullough, Katie Wilson & Nick Afanasiev.  It was directed by Travis Fort, which, on IMDb, this is his only credit.  I also have to make note that the film editor is Ashley Carr, Brian Finifter, etc.  Ashley's credits include Battle of Los Angeles as a production asst., and Brian's resume is about the same.  The producer was David Michael Latt.  Again, with Battle of Los Angeles in his resume.  (One of the most abysmally written and edited movies ever created!)

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2012: Ice Age opens to a scene of people trekking across ice to what I presume is a glacier.  There's radio chatter in the background talking about a glacier detaching from some shelf.  We next witness a volcanic eruption spewing from the ice or glacier.

We switch to a scene of a family in a car, bickering while they try to call someone on a radio.  We have no clue where they are.

Back to the ice, the people the car folks were trying to contact were at the ice.  The last man standing at the ice told our car folks that the ice shelf is erupting and on fire.  Then our man in a helicopter didn't get high enough and goes poof.

We haven't established what city the folks in the car are in, yet.


The driver, Bill, is told by his peers to put his family on a plane and send them to Mexico, as the polar ice will be slamming into America in several hours.

Bill talks to his wife and tells her they have to get out of Maine. (Ah, 15 minutes in and we finally find out where we're located.)  They decide they have to drive as fast as they can to New York.  Their daughter was just sent there in the beginning of the movie.

Go commercial...

We come back from the commercial and we're in New York?  Not sure, as there's a bit of mix up of coordinating details.

In one scene, everyone is looking up and seeing F-16's, then they become F-14's, then back to F-16's, and such.  But it didn't matter... the really fast moving shelf of ice took out an F-16.  And then the planes fired missiles at mother nature's ice shelf that was moving faster than they were.

And it goes from there.

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2012: Ice Age had a lot of disconnects.  If you blinked, you missed critical details.  Conversations didn't seem to flow.  Characters didn't seem connected.  Even while they sat in the same car!

The effects... well, there were some great stock footage scenes, but the effects were haphazard.  The glacier was confusing visually. I had to know what was happening in the scene for the visual to maybe, make sense.  But then they flipped a real car.  Not a CGI car!  I don't think I've ever seen a real live car get flipped for a Syfy movie!  Yet to have a scene swap airplane types from frame to frame and such was pretty confusing.  Hence, why earlier I mentioned the film editors.

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Sure, I'm bashing on the movie.  Over on IMDb, about 2,500 folks chimed in and gave the movie a whopping average score of 2.3.

It was a wee bit below the usual fare for Syfy.  I give it a "5!"  As in five beers are needed to enjoy the movie.  But most Syfy movies should be enjoyed with friends, pizza and beer.  Right?

Thus ends another snarky TV review from Cinema Static of a "fun" Syfy movie.

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