SunnyHello Nice effects though.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Chris S. By my armchair scientific knowledge, Supervolcano is well based on the geology of Yellowstone (which *is* a supervolcano). This docu-drama's strength is the telling of the prelude, occurrence, and consequences of the super-eruption which has already happened three times at Yellowstone and will again someday. Geologists wrestle over what they know and what they don't. Scientists, reporters, and government wrestle with the politics and ethics of what to tell the public. FEMA wrestles with how to prepare for the eruption, how to aid the millions affected by it, and realizing how little they can do. The world slowly realizes that they, not just the U.S., are affected.The acting, by largely unknown actors, is solid. Nothing special, but this isn't a character development movie. The story is solid. Plot holes are few, and the only one that affects the science is minor. Production values are BBC-solid. Story, dialogue, and videography are restrained; the movie is blessedly free of Hollywood's gratuitous romance and melodrama, mindless heroism, and closeups of beautiful bodies. Good musical score. Special effects are low-budget but mostly effective, with one glaring exception: frequent intercut images, a fraction of a second each, accompanied by a loud electrical sizzle-snap. Most are negative (color-reversed) versions of what we just saw or are about to see. The intercuts are meant to heighten the tension, and they do, but only a handful of the hundreds of them aid the story. The rest are cheap yanks on our startle response.I have two other small beefs. First, the movie uses news clips of recovery from actual volcanic eruptions, showing places and people that clearly aren't in North America. Those briefly, jarringly broke my suspension of disbelief. Second, an aerial view of what was supposed to be post-eruption Yellowstone was an ordinary scene of mountain country. What could have been a potent visual was unconvincing and disappointing.Supervolcano focuses on the human consequences of the super-eruption, on how helpless we are against the power of nature, and does so grippingly. I would have liked more of the perspective -- which is mentioned only in passing -- that we are a minuscule part of the drama of creation, and that there is grandeur even in our own extinction. Still, Supervolcano is a powerful reminder to be humble about our place in the universe, a reminder we need regularly.Highly recommended.

Rich Clayton Not a bad story, very much along the lines of "The Day After Tomorrow" and considering it was financed by the BBC and some other European countries throwing in cash, the effects are pretty good. Having just watched it on BBC HD the quality of the picture is outstanding. Very strange though why the bulk of the actors are Canadian... perhaps US actors wanted too much money :-) who knows. Would guess it was shot in Canada for cheapness, with a few location shots of Yellowstone thrown in to add to the illusion. The Canadians did a good job playing Americans, and only let slip the odd "oot" sound for "out" :-) Good effort BBC.

Theo Robertson This was hyped up with a massive amount of trailers and one of the things I dislike about a lot of programmes these days is the hype they receive . I also noticed it was one of those very multinational productions like THE GRID so I was expecting a very mid Atlantic flavour full of bed hopping , mawkishness , action scenes , really poor dialogue and of course a happy ending but what I got was something unexpected The first episode is a bizarre mix involving soap opera , disaster movie build up and an episode of the BBC science show HORIZON . The characters are introduced and some of them are interviewed for camera . Instantly I thought this was a mistake since the interviews are conducted in the past even ie if they are interviewed then we know they'll be seeing the final credits and won't die . However when the supervolcano erupts setting off a chain reaction of other volcanic eruptions it becomes clear that the interviewees are out of the line of fire and the ones in danger haven't been interviewed hence they might die . So much for my conclusion that we'll be having an optimistic ending . What does become clear is that the human race may suffer the fate of the dinosaurs ! SUPERVOLCANO is gripping , informative and downbeat . It's maybe not as shocking as the BBC docudrama THREADS but in its own way it's just as effective . It's not flawless , for example the special effects look a little too like CGI in some scenes and there's bits that just don't ring true like people in Britain stocking up on food and water in the face of a coming disaster , sorry but we don't do that in this country - We just sit back in an apathetic manner in front the television with a cup of tea in our hands . Brits give fatalism a bad name . If I have one serious problem then it's the fact the narrative is too short . We find out that the ash in the atmosphere has blocked out much of the suns light meaning we have a " Nuclear winter " effect whereby even at the height of Summer the Earth's temperature will cool leading to all sorts of geographical disasters like famine in the third world where millions will die but this is only referred to in passing while another effect - The collapse of the American economy and all that entails - is not mentioned at all . But despite the flaws this is a pretty good speculative drama simply because iit's all too credible

JRmf Didn't expect too much from this docudrama but was very impressed by the science as well as being entertained by it as thriller/sci-fi.These days when people doubt that the Holocaust ever happened, or think that it is technically easy to destroy a clutch of incoming MIRVd ICBMs, such might discern little difference between SuperVolcano and The Day After Tomorrow (which bear some obvious similarities), but I found SV vastly more credible in concept than Day After.There IS a vast lava chamber under Yellowstone Park (as well as a dozen others in other parts of the world) which DOES have the potential to erupt in a continent and world devastating way, as a SuperVolcano. It has erupted at least twice in the past, roughly every 600,000 years and is statistically due for another eruption "about now". Of course with a timescale uncertainty of some ± 100,000 years, one is rightly skeptical about it blowing next week, but SV dealt with even this aspect of the event in a convincing way. The inevitable doubts - "it couldn't possibly..." - ultimately had to give way to what Nature was actually doing. At that point, denying what was happening amounted simply to a cover-up and cost many lives.I liked the frequent cutaways to scientists' giving informed opinions/facts about the event. The other big uncertainty in the event, as to how devastating it will be, is the nature of the lava in the chamber. Is it sufficiently fluid to be "eruptible"? At present we simply do not know. Perhaps in a few hundred years (assuming the planet is still habitable and that anything at all matters), technology will have advanced to the point where all these questions can be answered, the eruption's timing and impact can be accurately predicted and appropriate measures taken to minimise destruction, or maybe even to stop it from happening at all.10/10