Ahhh our careers are sliding into the ocean ahhhhhh
Here’s 2012, summed up: Look, some recognizable landmark! Kablam! Look, a giant wave! Wooo! Do our intrepid Good Guys have enough time to outrun the imploding planet and foil a plot to save only the pretty, rich people? Probably!
It’s pretty clear what happened to bring us to this point. Roland Emmerich, who’s made such cinematic classics as Independence Day, The Patriot, Godzilla, and The Day after Tomorrow, was asked if he wanted a quintillion billion bazillion dollars to make a movie about the end of the world, and he said sure. Then he took parts of each movie’s script, filmed them mostly with CGI, and pocketed the rest. Viola! Greatest movie!
[A quick break to sum up the plot. Apparently, the sun and the planets have all aligned with the center of the galaxy, which winds up causing the Earth's crust to break up, which then causes the tectonic plates to shift. Mass hysteria! Dogs and cats, living together! The End.]
See, there are two ways Emmerich could have gone with this movie. He could have given us characters to follow whom we cared a little about, thus involving us in their plights, and mixed in some convincing special effects. Or he could have said, “The heck with the characters, give me blowy-uppy thingys.” This sometimes works: See Independence Day, a movie that made me feel pretty good when I left the theater after seeing it but that ultimately, frankly, was pretty bad.
Emmerich chose the latter. Which would have been fine, but the effects themselves are wildly unrealistic and often take so long to set up that you completely notice how godawful they really are. For example – and if you’ve seen the trailer, this is in there – there’s a scene in which the Sistine Chapel falls, crushing thousands of spectators. Because the toppling is so slow to complete, it becomes painfully obvious that it’s just a film running on a screen behind people running away. Sad and unintentionally hilarious.
And you can forget about the plot, really, because most of it makes no sense anyway and would happen only in a Big Movie like this. Of COURSE John Cusack is divorced from his hot, bitchy wife (Amanda Peet) and of COURSE she’s hooking up with a plastic surgeon who of COURSE winds up having had some flying lessons that of COURSE will save them all and of COURSE Cusack’s young son will somehow save the day as well and of COURSE there is a Russian businessman who used to be a boxing legend and of COURSE he punches someone out. And of COURSE people say “My God!” a lot, because that’s what people do in crappy disaster films. And of COURSE the president is black, because in Hollywood black people get to be president only if disaster is a-coming.
At least the acting isn’t horrible. Because everyone just runs from place to place in an effort to escape the horror, there aren’t any subtle, low-key scenes that would allow good actors to flourish. Cusack is good in general, but what the heck is he doing in here? He’s usually so good at picking projects, and he chose this? Willingly? Oliver Platt plays the kind of role that Bruce McGill typically gets, the hamhanded, I’m-in-charge, Al-Haig-like politician. I can’t even remember his title. Danny Glover gets to be president and does get the best dialog in the film, even if his role isn’t a big one. Woody Harrelson, as a crazed DJ deep in Yellowstone is also a lot of fun, although he’s not the kind of guy you’d want to sit next to on a transatlantic flight.
Final verdict: Yikes. Yikes, yikes, and yikes. If you dare watch this travesty, you might find yourself laughing hysterically at things – and this is important – that were not meant to be funny. If that’s your thing, this is your movie. I managed to see this as a matinee, so I’m not out the $10-$15 that some people are right now, so at least I got that going for me. Best advice: Watch it for free at home on a big-screen TV to fully appreciate the magnitude of suck.
2012: *
#1 by Ray on November 23, 2009 - 10:57 am
I should have known when I saw Emmerich’s name on this film that I wasn’t going to like it. I LOATHED Independence Day. I haven’t seen a Will Smith movie since. And Godzilla was a huge disappointment for Godzilla fans everywhere. The Day After Tomorrow was not as bad, but was ultimately forgettable, seeing as how I don’t remember much about it other than Dennis Quaid almost falling through a frozen something or other, and of course, Jake Gyllenhaal’s disturbing eyebrows. So I knew going in that 2012 had the odds stacked against it. But it’s the kind of movie you have to see on the big screen, so I sucked it up and went. And surely enough, I thought the effects were good in most scenes, but that was about it.
I did find the Sistine Chapel effect to be a bit lacking. But they did a good job of showing the buildings being torn apart with people dangling from the rafters. Almost too good a job. I couldn’t help but think back to September 11 and wonder if this movie is going to be a traumatic experience for anybody who associates it with that day. You have to be very careful with the “collapsing building” thing these days. It can tend to hit a little too close to home.
I also thought it was rather strange and convenient that parts of the globe in the western hemisphere were blowing up and caving into themselves along tectonic fault lines, while other parts in the eastern hemisphere remained relatively unscathed until they started getting hit by tsunamis. Tibet is just as close to a tectonic fault line as France, but France suffered a far worse fate in this film, while Tibet was spared until the end of the film. Far be it from Hollywood to let scientific accuracy get in the way of making a big budget disaster movie.
Most of the actors did a reasonable job. But, as you suggested, only because there was not much acting for them to do. The world is blowing up around them and the most we get from them is a tear here and there and that’s about it. Amanda Peet had one short scene where she had to beg some Tibetans to save her kids even if they chose not to save the adults… but I expected so much more drama from a movie about the total destruction of everything on the earth. The only one that came close to having impact was the old guy on the boat who knew he was going to die and was saying his final goodbye to his son. I don’t know who that actor was, but he was the only character I felt something for. And the dog. I didn’t want to see the dog die either. But that’s because it was a dog and nobody ever wants to see the dog die.
There were two things I disliked most about this movie. One was the final scene, where the focus shifts from the traumatic devastation of the globe to a child finally being able to sleep in a bed without wetting herself. Really? Is that really the note they wanted to end the movie on? They could have done something to suggest the importance of the rebirth of humanity and they opted to go with bed-wetting?
The other was the simplistic way they tossed in references to the Mayans by saying “the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world in 2012.” Apparently, they couldn’t really go much deeper into that because it’s completely untrue. Calendars don’t predict the future. One of the Mayan calendars ends in December of 2012, but it wasn’t intended to represent the end of the world, as they had names for the time periods that came after 2012. They just didn’t get to make a new calendar because their culture died off before they reached the end of the current one. 2012 was just the end of their “millennium,” just like December 31, 2000 was the end of ours. It was separate aspects of the Mayan theology that associated the end of that “millennium,” or baktun as they called them, with some type of new awareness that humans will have as a result of a shift between their egos and their understanding of their true “eternal selves.” But that’s far too heavy a concept for Hollywood to take on is a disaster flick, so it was much easier to just perpetuate the false urban legend and just say the Mayans believed 2012 was the end of the world, when in fact they didn’t.
Overall, I found the movie to be thoroughly depressing. After sitting there for two hours watching the world get destroyed, I was hoping for a conclusion that was a bit more powerful and resonating than what 2012 delivered. They tried to insert a moral bit about humans behaving humanely in times of crisis, but it was kind of hard to swallow when you consider that it was played in the context of the superrich being humane enough to save some more of the superrich, while most of the common joes found themselves getting plunged into molten lava along with their homes, families and entire neighborhoods. They never had a chance. I also didn’t appreciate the irony of the movie suggesting the Mayan religion was right about the earth’s destruction, while taking a jab at the Christian faith by showing a bunch of Italians getting mowed down by the Sistine Chapel while turning to their faith in prayer. Though I do find it quite funny that the powers that be chose to “save” the David, the Mona Lisa and two of every animal in an “ark,” but didn’t choose to save the Pope… the one person Catholics traditionally associate with mankind being “saved.” Oh, the irony!
#2 by frothy on November 23, 2009 - 11:10 am
Well, you can always make another Pope. Not so much with works of art, I suppose.
Anyway yeah, the ending. It’s like devastation-devastation-devastation-ohnoez-whatwillwedo… and then at the end, a better society will emerge, right? If this was about a scrappy, ragtag bunch of survivors out to make a better life, a new society, that would have been nice, but this was nothing but rich people saving rich people. It was hypcritical to show us all these animals and works of art being saved, as if that were noble, against the backdrop of people being saved merely because they could afford a billion euros a seat.
Stupid, stupid movie. Only Roland Emmerich could make Michael Bay movies look cerebral.
#3 by frothy on November 26, 2009 - 4:23 pm
Also: There were two My Gods in the movie. I thought there’d be more. And in neither one was the person taking off his glasses at the time.