This review may contain spoilers
Ashfall: Explosive, Predictable, and Disappointing
Ashfall was honestly disappointing, especially for a Don Lee movie. I went in expecting his usual grounded intensity and instead got a pile of disaster-movie clichés stacked on top of each other. The constant back-and-forth between the protagonist and antagonist wore thin fast. After a while it stopped building tension and just felt repetitive, like the movie didn’t trust itself to move forward without circling the same conflict again and again.
What really pulled me out of it was how absurdly convenient everything became. Team members just showing up exactly when needed, situations resolving because someone happened to be there at the perfect second. It stopped feeling like a high-stakes disaster and started feeling like a checklist of plot necessities being ticked off.
And the personal drama didn’t help. The captain’s wife surviving everything, making it onto the bus, and then ending up with Robert felt forced and unnecessary. Add in the magically successful phone call in North Korea at the exact right moment and I was fully in “you’ve got to be kidding me” mode. It wasn’t emotional, it was eye-roll inducing.
The effects are decent and there are moments where the scale works, but the writing undercuts all of it. For a Don Lee film, this felt oddly hollow. Not terrible, but definitely a letdown, and far more predictable and contrived than it had any right to be.
Watchable if you like disaster movies, but nowhere near Don Lee’s best and way too convenient for its own good.
What really pulled me out of it was how absurdly convenient everything became. Team members just showing up exactly when needed, situations resolving because someone happened to be there at the perfect second. It stopped feeling like a high-stakes disaster and started feeling like a checklist of plot necessities being ticked off.
And the personal drama didn’t help. The captain’s wife surviving everything, making it onto the bus, and then ending up with Robert felt forced and unnecessary. Add in the magically successful phone call in North Korea at the exact right moment and I was fully in “you’ve got to be kidding me” mode. It wasn’t emotional, it was eye-roll inducing.
The effects are decent and there are moments where the scale works, but the writing undercuts all of it. For a Don Lee film, this felt oddly hollow. Not terrible, but definitely a letdown, and far more predictable and contrived than it had any right to be.
Watchable if you like disaster movies, but nowhere near Don Lee’s best and way too convenient for its own good.
Was this review helpful to you?
