“Makes The Day after Tomorrow look like yesterday’s news… 2012 meets Tidal Wave.”

Well, no. And no. There’s actually very little in the way of full-on destruction; such hyperbole merely obfuscates what’s really quite a decent disaster movie. More concerned with plot and character and slow burning in its build-up, the film offers a lot of science (for non-Japanese speakers this means reams of subtitles) concerning delamination – or layers of the Earth’s crust peeling off.

The conclusion? Impending cataclysm is less than a year away and Prime Minister Yamamoto’s solut­ion is a finely stoical “do nothing”, calmly accepting the real possibility of up to 80 million deaths.

The perspective, hovering Google Earth-style over the unfolding action, gives the film a slightly dreamy, disembodied feel, and in an interesting sub-plot we see played out the ramifications of a destructive natural phenomenon on a country’s economic fortunes, an effect rarely addressed in other disaster movies (please read The Shock Doctrine).

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the film ends on an upbeat note (would Japanese audiences really have wanted to see their vulnerable island-nation washed away?), with echoes of the gung-ho attitude more usually associated with US films like Independence Day and Armageddon.