Hola all. Massawyrm here.
2012 is a movie so bad that the Vatican is in talks with God to cancel the actual Armageddon altogether. An unnamed source within those hallowed halls has revealed to me that “The whole thing is a clusterfuck. The big man’s pissed. At a time when people should be reflecting on their lives, family and salvation, this movie is going to have them trying to outrun skyscrapers in single engine planes and the hordes of Hell in dune buggies. Now we have to pin the whole thing on Mayan laziness or an attempt at the job security in the astronomical calendar making industry. And I was really looking forward to meeting Jesus too.”
To fully understand what went wrong here we have to go back 11 years to the summer of 1998, when all life on earth was threatened not by an ancient Y2K bug, but by giant fucking slabs of rock and ice the size of Texas. That summer we saw two identical concepts realized in two very different ways. One film chronicled the end of the world and the race to save our species from extinction. DEEP IMPACT was a science fiction drama about coming to grips with our own fragile nature and our inability to save ourselves. The other movie, ARMAGEDDON, was distinctly more ‘Merican, in which the USA’s best and brightest realize the only way to save the Earth is to strap a rocket to the ass of a bunch of surly, drunken rednecks and blast them into space with a shit ton of nookular weapons so they can blow that shit up real good. Rather than dealing with the gripping realities of the end of the world, it was an action buddy-comedy with moon buggy rides, machine guns and fiery explosions in space.
As a director, Roland Emmerich possesses the skill-set to make only one of these movies. He’s made UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, STARGATE, INDEPENDENCE DAY and GOD-fucking-ZILLA. If there is military to be dispatched, 50’s era super-scientists to wag their fingers while pulling batshit insane pseudoscience out of their asses and wily rednecks to fly crop-dusters into alien motherships, this is the mother fucker to do it. So why in God’s name didn’t he try to remake ARMAGEDDON?
Watching Roland Emmerich try to remake DEEP IMPACT is kind of like watching a monkey try to fuck a football. He just can’t figure it out. And fumble and twist and turn though he might, the end result is always the same, with everyone involved leaving frustrated and ultimately disappointed. It’s not a movie, it’s the proof of concept for a shitty videogame destined for the $14.99 shelf. There is nothing remotely movie-like about this film except that it was projected on a very large screen and no one was handed a controller.
Completely lacking anything to do with the Mayan Calendar whatsoever – except to mention no less than three times that the Mayans knew some crazy shit was going to go down in the year 2012 -- we’ve run out of virtually everything we can surmise to kill the Earth and have inevitably turned to the sun. Finally succeeding in having created a problem we can’t solve with nuclear weapons (psst, douchebags, Danny Boyle saved the Earth from the sun two years ago, and he managed to find a way to incorporate nuclear weapons) we watch as the Earth is boiled from the inside out like an egg left in the microwave too long. This causes a number of cracks and eruptions on the surface, dooming us all.
So how does sooper-geenyus Roland Emmerich showcase this incredible, previously un-thunk scenario? By putting John Cusack in dangerous situations and watching him run from them. Over and over again. Like a video game, Cusack must navigate from level to level as he is given badass vehicles to outrun increasingly more ludicrous natural disasters. He outruns earthquakes in a limo and citywide sinkholes in a Cessna and a volcanic eruption in an RV and a wall of burning ash in a cargo plane. And that’s just the things he outruns in the beginning of the second act.
Remember how ridiculous that scene was in THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW in which our heroes outrun the fucking weather? This is worse. Because this movie is entirely constructed of these scenes loosely strung together with weak melodrama vomited from the mouths of talented actors. Just wait until people try to outrun tsunamis. Because they do. The only time no one is running from something is when they are inexplicably about to crash into something instead.
All the while the film attempts to be lofty, dreamy and inspirational. It takes itself completely god damned seriously. It’s hard enough to hear the film over the pained, distant screams of science, begging to be put out of its misery for the abominations Emmerich tries to wring from it, but as it attempts to be important, the film is often drowned out by the yawns of the audience. Like a teenage nerd in Doc Martins and eyeliner it wants so badly to be something that it isn’t and never for a moment fools anybody. Imagine PEARL HARBOR without the 40 minute scene of attacking PEARL HARBOR and you begin to understand how overwrought and mind numbing this is.
BUT THE SPECIAL EFFECTS! THOSE ARE COOL RIGHT? No. Fuck the special effects. The only thing they serve to do is to punctuate how little else is actually going on in the movie. Making matters worse is that Emmerich is throwing so many money shots at you at once that he never lingers to let you take in just how awesome a spectacle it is all supposed to be. It is a rapid fire staccato of carnage that you become completely inured to within the first five minutes of it happening. He even goes so far as to steal a few Titanic gags, trying to make amusing light of the terrible things happening to people. You might giggle when someone plummets from a building to their death. But that’s the extent of your emotional attachment.
And when you fly over a city being swallowed by the sea, you never believe it, you never feel it. You don’t care. And you’re not even allowed to marvel long enough at single shots to focus on any one thing to think is cool. The few shots we do watch for more than a few seconds are all the same, water pouring over mountains. And that never looks real for a fucking second. Remember that awesome shot in ARMAGEDDON when the large piece of asteroid obliterates Paris? There is more spectacle and emotional resonance in that single, 11 year old shot than in the whole and breadth of this tired, lazy video game.
Seriously, by the third time John Cusack tries to outrun something you’ve seen pretty much everything this movie has to offer. A complete and utter waste, if you miss this you will have missed nothing.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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