Leofwine_draca ABSOLUTE ZERO is an absolute pig of a film; conceived as a zero-budget, made-in-Canada rip-off of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The modern-day disaster movies made by the SyFy Channel and The Asylum look like masterpieces by comparison.The storyline sees part of a glacier breaking off to bring winter to Miami. Soon enough the whole of Florida is at freezing point so it's up to the usual renegade scientist and his extended family to do something about it. Everything imaginable about the movie is horrid: the script, the dialogue, the almost entire lack of believability throughout. The CGI effects of snow drifts and storms look like they've been drawn onto the camera with a child's pencil. The constant melodrama is laughable.Hardworking B-movie actor Jeff Fahey is the gruff lead here, but even he looks flabby and tired by the whole thing. BAYWATCH actress Erika Eleniak plays his estranged wife, but there were only ever a couple of reasons why she was popular and they've long since headed south. As usual, a couple of annoying teenage children turn out to be the cleverest ones around.

dahlswede If you can overlook a number of inaccuracies with respect to the scientific information presented, the movie "Absolute Zero" (2006) offers an entertaining bit of diverting disaster plot fare. It provides content well suited to a family viewing audience, without offensive language, graphic sex scenes or needless crudity. Some scenes stretch credibility, yet the movie as a whole discusses a potentially timely geophysical concern which had not obtained a lot of recent public discussion in the news media.The plot unfolds in a structured manner, with tension rising until near the very end of the plot. Additionally, the central characters, although sometimes a bit stereotyped, generally behave according to traits and personality flaws presented early in the course of the drama. The conflict between the protagonist and the chief antagonist (a force of Nature) originates clearly within the first few minutes.The actors and actresses provide entertaining, sincere depictions. Some of the obvious errors in production, such as scientists in Antarctica wearing insufficient protective gear or violating basic safety protocols with aplomb indeed do stretch credibility, as do some of the special effects. (But since it has been a long time since the most recent magnetic pole shift, portraying one of those events in a realistic manner likely involves considerable technical challenges.)"Absolute Zero" clearly indicates why weather-related subjects and global warming issues should concern the public. The final few moments of the film indeed seem almost reminiscent of a timeless Old Testament theme, Lot's wife breaking the instruction to not look backwards. The inability of modern people to refrain from imposing a materialistic, profit-driven perspective in analyzing serious issues of public safety may perhaps constitute one of the underlying themes of the film.

Martin Meenagh This film is so bad, it was fascinating--almost completely predictable, but in the fashion of a close competitor (The Evil Under Loch Ness), the writers or directors would at some points get bored and just veer off on a mad, inexplicable and obviously unexplained tangent. I love bad films and B-movies, but this...it hypnotises like the worst of car crashes. The production values were also just strange; Jeff Fahey looked like a sort of Liberace lovechild, Will Ferrell dropped in a pot of ink, the greedy administrator belonged in Jud Suss or something, and, well, Elena looked like she was crying off-set at the memory of under siege for most of the takes. You know you're in trouble when Steven Seagal movies are a past high point, and my advice to her is to maybe do something to rebuild--say organic farming--and buy gold coins with the royalties. They can be got very cheap.Not even Leslie Nielsen or Bill Murray could have deadpanned their way through this to save it. Watch if only to learn what not to do, or, alternatively, get drunk and set the audio to German or something central European.

winner55 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.