Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Alright everyone, let's calm down and be honest with ourselves. What the hell were you expecting? I was expecting something a whole lot worse, I know that. Let's back things up. When you first saw the trailer for or clips from 2012, you got a little sexually excited, didn't you? It's OK, I won't tell anyone. At Comic-Con in July, when director and co-writer Roland Emmerich showed an extended clip of California essentially dying from the earthquake to end all earthquakes, I voided my bowels, ran to the men's room, changed my adult Huggies, and voided them a second time. In the words of a great man who used to write for this very site, “Pants, meet shit.”
And as much as Emmerich has made some colossal missteps over the years (GODZILLA, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, and the worst of all, 10,000 B.C.), the man also knows how to make some interesting if not entirely engaging works, such as UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, STARGATE, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and THE PATRIOT. The guy also knows how to blow stuff up on a spectacular scale; what he has failed to do time and time again is draw even somewhat believable characters that seem like anything more than gameboard pieces to be moved around, screaming, running, looking terrified, and occasionally die.
Emmerich has gone from destroyed buildings to leveling cities to, in 2012, ending life on Earth by making the planet's crust essentially crumble under our feet. So what do you think 2012 is about? Is it about trying to stop the geothermal forces of the universe that are causing the earth to die? Of course not, that would be silly. So what we are left with is finding out how the leaders of the world would deal with about three years' warning about the end of the planet. What would they save, who would they save, what would they build that could sustain the coming apocalypse and house everything and everyone they wanted to keep alive? To say these are weighty questions would be an understatement, but they are ones that are legitimately posed in this film.
But 2012 isn't a movie about philosophy and morals (OK, it is a little); it's a film about destroying the planet city by city, nation by nation. You think the destruction of California sequence looks impressive, wait until you see Yellowstone Park turn into the world's largest volcano, or the massive tidal wave that wipes out the Eastern Seaboard. As an act of kindness to his audience, Emmerich has even built into his 2-hour 40-minute movie scenes of such lameness and inaction that they might as well be scrawling the words "Pee Break!" across the bottom of the screen while they play. This might be the most well-paced Roland Emmerich film ever made.
He's even cast a slightly more interesting group of actors to use as his game pieces. John Cusack provides the requisite Everyman quality to his character as a failed writer/limo driver who just happens to be at all the right places at the right times to survive wave after wave of intense destruction. Amanda Peet plays his ex-wife and mother of their two kids (giving Cusack something to protect), while Tom McCarthy plays her new husband, a decent guy who the kids actually love, which makes Cusack all the more jealous. In the scientific/government community, we have Chiwetel Ejiofor as the geologist who first realizes the true extent of the threat as far back as 2009 (hey, wait a minute... ). Oliver Platt is on hand as his superior and link to the President (Danny Glover... I'll give you a second to let that one sink in), whose daughter (Thandie Newton) is also deeply involved in his work. Woody Harrelson is tossed in as a kook living in Yellowstone, broadcasting a Pirate Radio signal predicting the impending destruction. One character makes the very interesting point, "Isn't it funny how all those guys with cardboard signs were right?" Indeed.
So how does it all hold together? Pretty well, to tell the truth, for about the first two hours. I won't reveal where all of this evacuating and running around leads to, but there actually is a plan to save hundreds of thousands of carefully selected citizens of the world. It's a little underwhelming. More than that, it's silly and illogical. Yes, I'm calling only a small portion of a movie about the end of the world silly and illogical. And what's worse, the film drags and hinges on some pretty stupid stuff at the end as well. It isn't an impending wall of water that threatens the survivors; it's a stuck door. And there's a speech that Ejiofor delivers just before all hell brakes loose for the few remaining humans that is so stupid and ill-timed as to be laughable from beginning to end. If someone had shot him at that moment and said, "Let's get the hell out of here!" at that moment, I would have applauded. There are also characters like a Russian businessman and his two chubby twin boys who are incredibly annoying and clearly aimed at giving us unnecessary villains in a movie where the world is the only villain we need, thank you very much.
Whereas most disaster movies of the past have been two hours of build up followed by 20 minutes or so of awesome destruction, 2012 keeps it coming and only lets up long enough to let us know exactly who died and give us time to hit the bathroom. Even if you loathe the movie to its very fiber as a storytelling endeavor, there's no denying the spectacular nature of the special effects. And no, special effects are never a sole excuse to see any movie, but I think there's more here than just that. I also believe that if 2012 had come out during the summer, it would have given TRANSFORMERS 2 a run for its money as the most successful film of the year. This is a summer movie event film that you don't have to completely turn your brain off to enjoy, and that's a rarity that I can get behind. The take-no-prisoners 2012 finally sees Emmerich pulling tools off his belt that work together rather than just clanging into each other at the job site. Most of this film is highly watchable, and some of it approaches greatness.
-- Capone
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