The science is actually worse than in The Day After Tomorrow, and I would excuse that if the characters and story were any good. But they weren't. The characters were 2-dimensional and the drama was stolen from much better movies. I mean, where have you seen this before: Main character is a dad who has joint custody over his 2 kids, a girl and a boy. The girl is fine with him, but the boy doesn't like him too much, which you can tell because the boy calls him by his first name instead of "dad". Their mom is dating a plastic surgeon who is a huge tool. And these are the people we're with throughout the whole movie.
The disaster is that the earth's core is destabilized and is shifting and breaking apart because a solar flare caused an influx of neutrinos which caused the formation of a new subatomic particle which somehow heated the earth's lower layers. The more you know about neutrinos, the less sense that makes.
The worst part is that they try to spend the entire second act developing the characters, but anyone who paid to see this movie was only seeing it because of all the destruction shown in the trailers. It also only shows how flat the characters really are.
I expected the movie to be bad. I didn't expect it to be a manifestation of every disaster movie clich