2012
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Two and One Half Stars
Roland Emmerich, it seems, exists as a filmmaker for the sole purpose of destroying the planet more authoritatively than the last time Roland Emmerich destroyed the planet. His list of credits, in order (some titles excluded), include “Independence Day,” “Godzilla,” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” Look at these titles and you can see how he has steadily upped the ante. Emmerich lays pretty thorough waste to the planet in his latest, “2012,” which I suspect will become some sort of opus for end-of-the-world epics.
Some peculiar shift in the sun’s rays is his latest justification for worldwide pandemonium, transforming our sunlight essentially into microwaves that have cooked out planet from the inside out. And now, with the earth’s mantle melted and unstable, the tectonic plates twist, turn and tango into oblivion, and we humans are not strapped in for the ride. With this premise, Emmerich obliges himself to turn cities upside down, flood them, blow them up and scramble them around until China is a puddle jumper’s hop from Hawaii.
These events are primarily witnessed through the eyes of novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who pieces together the pending disaster during an evening long vacation with his estranged son and daughter to Yellowstone National Park, when he stumbles across the U.S. government’s head geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and a hippie conspiracy connoisseur (Woody Harrelson) stumbles into him.
The government has long been aware, we learn, and have been assassinating anyone who threatens to release the information in an effort to avoid widespread panic. Soon rumors are surfacing of spaceships or something of the like being built to save a small, wealthy sliver of the human race. Jackson pieces it together pretty quickly. No one else has a clue.
From here Jackson and his estranged family join a typecast Russian bureaucrat who has tickets for him and his children to enter these survival pods, whatever they may be, and set off around the world to China, so that we might see that disaster has not confined itself this time to the United States alone.
As is usually the case in effects epics, the human story of “2012” is weak, populated only by stereotypes in place to shout expository lines and provide emotional cues. That the human drama is not the focal point of movies like this does not make this entirely forgivable.
Emmerich’s special effects are exciting and ambitious, but suffer from that artificial big budget gleam that prevents them from being particularly realistic and involving.
This brings me to “2012’s” biggest problems. Special effects, no matter how breathtaking, cannot carry a film for 158 minutes. A film that cannot invest its audience in its characters cannot convince them to care. After 2 1/2 hours of earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves, none of the previously mentioned phenomena can be particularly engaging if we have no stake in them.
“2012” is inspired by predictions from countless ancient civilizations who predicted that our world would come to an end on or around Dec. 21, 2012. Most notable of these were the Mayans, whose astronomical studies led them to believe that one of the many stars they had tracked would eventually collide with earth. We are close enough now, as NASA informs us, that if this were actually the case, we would be able to see this celestial body with the naked eye.
“2012” takes a different approach, one that deals not with “When Worlds Collide” sensibilities, but with the “When Earth Strikes Back” mentality that M. Night Shyamalan explored a couple years ago in “The Happening” and that Emmerich himself had already explored in “The Day After Tomorrow.”
I’m not sure the earth can be more thoroughly destroyed than it is here, which provides it with a sort of audacious charm that many people will probably enjoy. And for all the casualties and chaos, Emmerich remembers that what is really interesting about this material to us Americans is not how the human race will survive, but rather whether or not Jackson and his estranged wife Kate will get together again.
Some peculiar shift in the sun’s rays is his latest justification for worldwide pandemonium, transforming our sunlight essentially into microwaves that have cooked out planet from the inside out. And now, with the earth’s mantle melted and unstable, the tectonic plates twist, turn and tango into oblivion, and we humans are not strapped in for the ride. With this premise, Emmerich obliges himself to turn cities upside down, flood them, blow them up and scramble them around until China is a puddle jumper’s hop from Hawaii.
These events are primarily witnessed through the eyes of novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who pieces together the pending disaster during an evening long vacation with his estranged son and daughter to Yellowstone National Park, when he stumbles across the U.S. government’s head geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and a hippie conspiracy connoisseur (Woody Harrelson) stumbles into him.
The government has long been aware, we learn, and have been assassinating anyone who threatens to release the information in an effort to avoid widespread panic. Soon rumors are surfacing of spaceships or something of the like being built to save a small, wealthy sliver of the human race. Jackson pieces it together pretty quickly. No one else has a clue.
From here Jackson and his estranged family join a typecast Russian bureaucrat who has tickets for him and his children to enter these survival pods, whatever they may be, and set off around the world to China, so that we might see that disaster has not confined itself this time to the United States alone.
As is usually the case in effects epics, the human story of “2012” is weak, populated only by stereotypes in place to shout expository lines and provide emotional cues. That the human drama is not the focal point of movies like this does not make this entirely forgivable.
Emmerich’s special effects are exciting and ambitious, but suffer from that artificial big budget gleam that prevents them from being particularly realistic and involving.
This brings me to “2012’s” biggest problems. Special effects, no matter how breathtaking, cannot carry a film for 158 minutes. A film that cannot invest its audience in its characters cannot convince them to care. After 2 1/2 hours of earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves, none of the previously mentioned phenomena can be particularly engaging if we have no stake in them.
“2012” is inspired by predictions from countless ancient civilizations who predicted that our world would come to an end on or around Dec. 21, 2012. Most notable of these were the Mayans, whose astronomical studies led them to believe that one of the many stars they had tracked would eventually collide with earth. We are close enough now, as NASA informs us, that if this were actually the case, we would be able to see this celestial body with the naked eye.
“2012” takes a different approach, one that deals not with “When Worlds Collide” sensibilities, but with the “When Earth Strikes Back” mentality that M. Night Shyamalan explored a couple years ago in “The Happening” and that Emmerich himself had already explored in “The Day After Tomorrow.”
I’m not sure the earth can be more thoroughly destroyed than it is here, which provides it with a sort of audacious charm that many people will probably enjoy. And for all the casualties and chaos, Emmerich remembers that what is really interesting about this material to us Americans is not how the human race will survive, but rather whether or not Jackson and his estranged wife Kate will get together again.
Rollan Schott
November 17, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan
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