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smccandlish
Reviews
10,000 Days (2014)
This is like 'Battlestar Galactica: The Movie' (1978) - it's TV content repurposed as a feature film
I like a few of the cast members in this, especially Peter Wingfield, Kim Myers, Kelsey Sanders, and John Schneider. The premise is semi-thoughtful, though not terribly original (not just in the wake of a series of "the world's freezing over" movies, but further back in sci-fi, e.g. Michael Moorcock's novel 'The Ice Schooner', 1969). And the core theme - that in an apocalypse, the main threat is other people - is an old and familiar one, and much better executed lately by 'The Walking Dead'.
However, much of the the 1-star negativity hurled at this production is treating it as if it's a regular feature film. It's not. It's a compression of the 2010 one-season TV series into a feature- length TV movie. I thus give it some slack in several respects. The effects are about on par with Sci-Fi Channel stuff of that era, and so is the dialogue, set design, costuming, cast calibre, etc. (What sets this apart, negatively, from series like 'Stargate' and its spin-offs, which also often had crap dialogue, cheesy production design, and low-end FX, is really the quality of the writing, of the plot-crafting.) Even the cliffhanger ending is the result of the TV series itself being cancelled before the story could be wrapped up. The kind of stilted dialogue (and dialect) of the outsider Farnwell clan is nowhere near as annoying as the "Cru-speak" of the Grounders in 'The 100' (which has survived 6 seasons so far, at least 1 longer than it should have). See also the super-mega-unbelievable diction of "King" Ezekiel, Eugene Porter, Jadis, and "Alpha" in 'The Walking Dead' (again, the overall plot writing saves that show from some terrible, terrible dialogue and characterization decisions).
I'm not sure WHY '10,000 Days' was repurposed into a movie (aired on television, then later released on DVD), but I'm glad it was: It allows a sci-fi junkie (and a Schneider fan, and whathaveyou) to get the gist of the show - warts and all - without having to watch 11 almost-hour-long episodes. That said, some of the character development is clearly lost, and a few lines and interpersonal reactions come across as non sequiturs, because too much of the original context has been cut out, especially when it comes to relations between family members. Anyway, it's really not THAT bad. If you want bad, see 'Stonehenge Apocalypse' (which oddly enough also has Peter Wingfield in it). Maybe I just liked '10,000 Days' a little because I once had a nightmare about a comet or asteroid glancing off the Earth with enough force to knock it out of orbit, with similar climatic results. And I also knew I was getting a compressed TV show of dubious original quality, and was happy for the compression.