Apolcalyptic Special Episode! - 2012 - 5/10

2012 - Roland Emmerich

When you pop in a movie about the end of the world and the last thing you see before the title sequence is the theft of the Mona Lisa, you know you’re in for a real cinematic treat that absolutely positively won’t ever go off the course of its story ever ever ever.

…Ah shit.

Taking everything out of the apocalyptic pantry and smashing it all into a two and a half hour long plot casserole, 2012 basically started off as Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure Where they Keep Looking Behind Them and Start Screaming only to turn into a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream that just sorta got dumb. Not since The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have I gotten to play the “if the movie could have ended here but needlessly kept going, take a shot” drinking game, but if you have a big ass graphic budget and a sadistic desire to get a few more scenes of mass destruction and human death in the mix, why the hell not, right?

Unless you were living under a rock (with the exception of those living under pyramid shaped ones in Mexico), you probably heard that the world was supposed to end on 12/21/2012, and this movie decided to take that to heart by doing the only naturally creative thing it could think of: blaming Mother-fucking Nature for it. In this episode, a massive solar flare erupts on the sun that starts melting the Earth’s core and scrambles every possible atmospheric circuit on the planet so that dickholes like Dennis Quaid can’t just blame it on “a weather cycle.” (Pussy.) 

As monument after monument topples down in very visually impressive sequences of “things made of nothing but dust or glass falling,” the story focuses on the intertwined lives of families, scientists, politicians, and workers trying to survive the ordeal, specifically the family of Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who has kids which is why you give a shit. Whereas the first half of this is a pretty good watch of “run, run, run, look behind you, scream, run, run, run,” 2012 regularly sneaks in hints of conspiracy that ultimately lead to a ridiculous turning point where you, the viewer, get blindsided for 45 minutes because the film decides it wants to send out a message about the value of a human life.

In the grand scheme of things, 2012 follows the same formula of a struggling couple having great sex where it begins with completely pointless denial, moves to a massive climax, dribbles into nothingness for an hour and then decides it wants to have a serious talk about the state of the relationship. The “destruction of the world” is truly breathtaking, but once that’s over it’s an hour and a half of just boring politics with pointless danger thrown in by the convenience of “oh, the weather has decided randomly to adjust our time table to exactly the amount of the time the current plot point needs to ‘cut it dangerously close.’” (Another drinking game that could be played with this movie.)

Like The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 tries to play the “power of family and relationship overcomes all” card and it just makes for a movie that’s full of eye candy with no actual flavor. This is why I liked Knowing as a much better apocalyptic drama because it didn’t try to mess with the formula and force you to root for anyone’s survival; you just got to sit back and watch as the world went boom and its twist had a certain serendipitous, yet uplifting feeling to it that wasn’t fucked around with by politics. If you’re doing an “end of the world” movie, do it fully: either destroy it (like in Knowing) or save it (like in Armageddon...but never LIKE Armageddon…ever). It just feels weird to sit for two hours and say “fuck, 9/10ths of the population is dead…but I’m glad those two made it!” You’re just kind of a selfish asshole at that point.

For impressive visual effects and a first half that was pretty amazing to watch, I give 2012 half credit: 5 dustbusters out of 10. Because fuck the second half. Seriously. If the Mayans were still around, they’d all die laughing at that nonsense.