2012

Look – it’s my own fault. I should have gone to see An Education instead. But somehow, even though I knew in advance it’d be garbage, actors like John Cusack and Thandie Newton drew me in. And I went and saw 2012. I’ll try to atone next week when the new Coen brothers film comes out.
In the meantime, I was disappointed that Sunday evening saw the cinema as full as it was. I was hoping that the lure of Shite-Factor would keep people at home. In the event, many of them rushed out of the cinema at the end anyway – perhaps to catch the result; perhaps to visit the loo after more than two and a half hours; or perhaps because they wanted to get out of the cinema as fast as possible after watching such rubbish.
In fact a couple of families left well before the end, although I tend to think that they were parents with particularly young children who’d paid little to no notice of the film’s 12A certificate. Just because you can take young children with you to 12A films, as the big slide at the start of the film says very clearly, it’s the responsibility of the accompanying adult to determine the film’s suitability for their kids. GIven that clearly this film featured millions of people dying (not graphically – but clearly ending up dead), it’s not going to be suitable for the more sensitive.
Anyway, back to the film. For reasons that aren’t very clear at all, the sun’s activity is getting higher, generating something or other under the earth’s crust, resulting in – well – carnage really.
Some Indian scientists discover this early on – I seem to remember that The Day After Tomorrow, also by Emmerich, had something similar. Before you know it, the governments of the world have joined in a secret cabal to do something in time for the impending crisis. It’d spoil the film for me to tell you what this is, but it’s not exactly explained how what they built was built, and in the location that it was placed. We do know that it was all built by Chinese slave labour.
In the meantime, John Cusack, who has to be separated from his wife and kids, is desperately trying to save his family’s lives. Cue a series of basically the same schenes, as repeatedly he ends up in one plane or another that only just takes off in time as the runway crumbles beneath him. The pilot, on every occassion, takes the opportunity to continue flying low rather than soar to great heights.
To say that this film is scientifically inaccurate is utterly pointless. When Yellowstone park explodes as a super-volcano, the pyroclastic cloud is surprisingly slow. Indeed the relativley slow planes always outrun them without trouble.
We get lots of international bits. While US President Danny Glover stays with his people (as well as the Italian PM – who clearly has nothing to do with Silvio Berlusconi), everyone else runs away, including the Queen with her Corgis. Someone’s bumped off in a Parisian underpass. And just in case you didn’t understand the reference, we’re explicitly told that this was the same place that Diana died.
Elsewhere, the entire conspiracy is somehow known to a mad Woody Harrelson, who’s busy broadcasting his beliefs on AM radio. Given that elsewhere people are being bumped off left and right for spilling the beans, quite how he’s surviving when he lives on his own in a trailer, isn’t really explained.
The first time we saw the White House destroyed – in Independence Day perhaps – it was quite exciting. But it’s now getting a bit dull. We see some different cities getting destroyed this time, but of course we see the White House get it again. Las Vegas is hit this time around (Michael “Let’s get ready to rumble!” Buffers gets a cameo), as well as large parts of India, all of California, and – well – all over the place really.
A cruise liner gets knocked over by a tsunami, although I was kind of led to believe that the water tends to flatten out and just move very fast only really forming a tidal wave when it hits shore.
Strangely, even the very high Himalayas seem to get a large volume of water hit them. I couldn’t begin to explain the physics that would make this possible.
At one point, the Emmerich seems to switch to digital video, to give a heightened reality as the end seems nigh! It’s a bit like he’s been watching too many Michael Mann films and likes what he sees. The problem is that the spectacle we’ve been watching up until now is so divorced from reality, that I believe in the goings on of Middle Earth more than in this film. I’d argue that a hand-drawn animation would somehow have more resonance than these technically fine, but still not believable computer graphics. There’s simply an absence of peril here.
The film is made by Columbia Pictures, and that means that Sony product placement is all pervasive. Every computer you see is a Vaio (the White House is particularly well-stocked with these), every phone a Sony Ericsson and so-on. It gets a little dull. Then there’s the Bentley, and the use of Microsoft’s Bing to find a satellite photo. None of it’s accidental. I know I shouldn’t find it distracting, but it is and I do.
The film’s overlong, the story’s obvious, most of the Americans survive (I’m not giving a great deal away), while most of the foreigners die. But not the dog… There are pointless speeches that are supposed to moving, uplifiting and heartwarming. And the film’s essentially vacuous. You don’t learn anything, and the subplot about John Cusack’s character’s book (the names here are pointless) is vomit-inducing. It sounds like the novel deserved to fail.
I love a good disaster movie, but the direness of imagination that means every film has to now raise the stakes of what’s gone before it, as well as the over-the-top graphics, mean that the genre is losing any credibility. This film is a cliché of itself.
Don’t bother. Catch up with this evening’s Doctor Who, which was much much better, and will linger a lot longer than the grandiose destruction of 2012.


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