Wonderful Movie

Why so much hype?

Waste of time

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Utter crap, waste of time. The first episode was mildly bad, second one was horrible. The biggest complaint was camera work. I actually got a case of motion sickness from the overly active camera shaking. I think the camera operator had Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and had been given a near lethal dose of caffeine. I understand the idea behind it but damn it, come on, there is a thing as too much. And then of course there is the poor acting and terrible "science" behind the story line. Ring of fire left me burning and yearning for a barf bag. A few changes would have made a world of difference but it is was it is. A burning pile of yak squeeze that should never have seen the light of day. Or maybe I'm being mean due to several hours of my life taken from me trying to choke down this horrible excuse for entertainment.

If there was a redeeming quality, it was Terry O'Quinn. He was great on LOST, and while his character is nowhere near as interesting he does do his best here and is quite commanding. The same cannot be said for the other actors who are all unbearably wooden and emotionless. When they don't act like they genuinely care or are living their characters' situations, at best they were indifferent, it is very difficult to be properly drawn in. Good characters and writing would have helped, but Ring of Fire manages to not even have those either. The characters are badly underwritten ciphers(for a three hour miniseries there was no excuse for this), the sort of stereotypes that we see all the time in movies featuring on the SyFy channel, and they are never more than that. The dialogue is clunky, overly-talky and dissolves too much into tedious melodrama and overlong exposition, it is often very over-familiar stuff that is made even more painful by awkward line delivery. There is very little to be invested in the story either. It was increasingly predictable(especially in the second half) and takes far too long to get going, two thirds of the first half is set-up exposition, and the excessive padding isn't enough to let go of the feeling that there wasn't enough story to sustain a three-hour running time. That there are too many sub-plots and none are particularly engaging is part of the problem as well. If it was done in half the time, with less dialogue, fewer subplots, more action and more attention to character, Ring of Fire would have been much more successful. Ring of Fire even looks as though it was made in a rush, with a unappealingly drab and grainy colour palette. There's been worse use of shaky cam, but it was distractingly over-used and the constant jerky movements are enough to make anybody seasick. There's also been worse CGI but that's not saying much, it's still dully rendered. Overall, a disaster in itself really. Terry O'Quinn is the least bad thing about it but even at the halfway mark I found myself begging for a fire extinguisher, the fact that I make it my business not to judge a movie/series without seeing the whole thing was the sole motivation for sticking with it. 2/10 Bethany Cox

I'm partial to disaster flicks and I found this DVD at Redbox, although it's a TV Miniseries. It's in two parts, each one about 90 minutes long, which I felt was overly long for this film. Of course, it's not up to the quality of classics like the original "Poseiden Adventure" or "Towering Inferno", although it had some positives to it adding up to an average rating from me.Set in Oregon, it centers on an oil company, Trans Nova, using a supposedly environmentally safe laser drill to find oil in a naturally protected preserve. However, surreptitiously they're digging lower than legal depths and what they think is a vast oil reserve is actually a compressed magma (lava) deposit. After a whistleblower, who works at Trans Nova, reveals this to the head scientist overseeing the project Dr. Matthew Cooper (Michael Vartan) and to the aggressive environmentalist opposing the project, Emily Booth (Lauren Lee Smith) they project a disaster unless the well is immediately shut down.Even as livestock and wildlife begin to die, the head of the Trans Nova project Oliver Booth (Terry O'Quinn)--yes Emily's estranged father-- refuses to shut it down. You can guess what happens next--disaster with a huge volcanic eruption and the threat of triggering the Ring of Fire, whereby 75% of the world's volcanoes could be activated and erupt.In addition to the length of the movie, other drawbacks I thought were rather wooden acting and dialogue plus too many scientific technical terms as it went along. I thought overall the special effects were so/so, but at times very well conceived. On the positive side, I thought it maintained tension fairly well and the rescue and survival stories, as is the norm in these epic films, were quite well done, and at times could be moving and touching.

The Ring of Fire, a rather unpopular miniseries for many reasons. Essentially this oil company is drilling too deep and hits magma. As a result, this apparently starts off a chain reaction to set off all the volcanoes across the pacific rim and the whole world is doom for some reason. Also a mountain/hidden volcano blows up like Mt. St. Helen but on a much smaller scale. Sounds interesting if you like end of the world movies about geography like Day After Tomorrow or 2012, but alas this is no where close. Honestly, it seemed like the writer opened up his middle school/high school geography text book to a random paragraph on volcanoes and said "yeah that'll work!" then proceeded to ignore the rest of the laws of science and nature. Oh and the best part is that the show is 2 parts totaling over 3 hours of your life that you could've spent doing something better like, well, anything else. So for the fun of it I'll just list nothing but the "pros" of the movie. Warning most are sarcastic.You should watch this movie if: 1) You liked Terry O'Quinn's performance of John Locke on lost and deep down always thought he was the true leader and now want to see him in a different show where he is the leader of a big giant oil company. (seriously though he does a good job and I liked him in Lost. The only reason why I gave this show 2 stars is because he alone deserves a star and there is no true zero rating). 2) You agree with the statement "all oil corporations are evil and will eventually destroy the world." 3) You love Michael Moore's movies because they stretch the truth so much about republicans and you'd like to see a director share that same type of attitude but direct it towards corporations. 4) You a tree hugger or a hippie 5) You want a new drinking game where you take a shot every time the camera is not focused (warning you WILL get drunk). 6) You really hate science and think that understanding it will just ruin movies for you 7) You think the teacher on the school bus is kind of cute (she is) 8) You love seeing people just stare as their dog chokes to death and do absolutely nothing about it even though they actually could save his life 9) You think meat is murder but killing them off 100 of them with CO2 gas pollution is OK 10) You love seeing government branches (in this case the EPA) ignore a situation that in real life they would immediately intervene in but instead blame it on lacking the necessary paper work. Oh the dreaded bureaucracies!!!This list goes one but I think you get the idea.