2012: A Review
End of the World or End of Great Movies?
2009-11-13
By Sergio A. Mims
CAST: John Cusack
Chiwetel Ejiofor
Amanda Peet
Thandie Newton
Woody Harrelson
Oliver Platt
Danny Glover
WRITTEN BY: Herald Kloser and Roland Emmerich
DIRECTED BY: Roland Emmerich
** TWO STARS
In his latest blockbuster movie, 2012, it’s obvious the word “overkill” is totally unknown to director Roland Emmerich. The German born director started his career making low budget sci-fi movies before moving on to incredibly enjoyable action thrillers like Stargate and Universal Soldier with Jean Claude Van Demme. But he finally hit the big jackpot with Independence Day while turning Will Smith from a player on a cancelled sitcom to a major Hollywood movie star.
Seeing the greenbacks, Emmerich went into a destruction binge with the unfortunate 1998 remake of Godzilla and his more successful global warning nightmare The Day After tomorrow. Along the way he’s tried his hand at different genres such as last year’s disastrous caveman movie 10,000 B.C.and the Revolutionary War film The Patriot with Mel Gibson playing the only Southern plantation owner in history with free black people working for him out of the kindness of their hearts.
With 2012 Emmerich has decided to go back to what he knows best, destroying the world, and this time in the biggest, loudest, most relentless and exhausting way possible. It also, unfortunately, happens to be dull, trite and mind-numbingly stupid as well.
The film was conceived to be the ultimate, definitive,mother of all disaster films, designed to shock and awe the audience. Instead it pummels the watchers into submission leaving them babbling wrecks worn out from the sheer effort of paying attention.
The film, which has no sense of proportion, let alone reality, is a rather poorly scripted excuse for a barrage of CGI-created special that become laughable.
Taken from the popular myth that the fact that the ancient Mayan calendar ends in December 2012 is a sign that the Mayans predicted the “end of days” (a theory recently discredited by Mayan descendants themselves as a misinterpretation) the movie starts off with 45 minutes of exposition and simplistic dialogue until the fireworks finally begin and keep going nonstop for another two hours until the ridiculously extended climax.
The trouble begins when powerful solar flares increase the temperature of the earth’s core causing continent-destroying earthquakes, tidal waves and tsunamis wiping out nearly all civilization on the planet.
In midst of all this world destruction the film focuses on various characters struggling to survive including a divorced struggling writer and father (Cusack) playing the film’s Everyman, his ex wife (Peet), Glover playing the POTUS, a high level White House geologist (Ejiofor) ringing the warning bellsof impending doom, Platt, an arrogant presidential advisor and film’s bad guy, Newton, the President’s daughter and assorted other characters along with the perfunctory cuddly dog.
The film takes some preposterous twists and turns and some totally unbelievable plot coincidences thrown in for sole purpose of getting the cast connected to one in some way. It’s essentially the Christian-based “Left Behind” stories without all the God stuff getting in the way. But at least that series had the Bible behind it to back it up.
From the moment each character appears, one can easily guess who’s going to make it and who will be crushed by the weight of falling debris.
The special effects in the film, since they were all created by various production houses, are uneven with some very well conceived work juxtaposed with the kind of third rate work seen mostly in college film student videos. Matters are made digital photography and speedy movements that cause eye strain. Also interestingly. with Glover playing the U.S. President in 2012, this makes it the second time in a disaster movie (Morgan Freeman played the POTUS in 1998’s Deep Impact) that most of the world is wiped while a black President is in charge. A not so subtle message perhaps?
