2012 (**½)

Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Starring: John Cusack, Chewitel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Jimi Mistry
Seen: December 4th 2009

**½ Out of ****

2012 is Roland Emmerich’s biggest, boldest, brashest, and most belligerent disaster film yet, and even though it is far better than The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC, it falls short of Independence Day and the underrated Godzilla. A safe deduction then, would be that Emmerich enjoys destruction. A lot. And that is what we get in 2012. A lot.

The movie starts the way most of these movies usually do, scientists running around trying to prove what they believe is going to happen. In this case Adrian Helmsley (Ejiofor) and Satnam Tsurutani (Mistry) are doing their best to convince Carl Anheuser (Platt), the President’s Chief of Staff, of coming events. But another slightly more sinister part also shows up here: shady business dealings with billionaires are also shown. Are people buying their own survival?

Jackson Curtis (Cusack) is a divorced writer / limousine driver and his wife Kate Curtis (Peet) has a new boyfriend. Jackson takes his son and daughter on a camping trip to Yellowstone National Park, where Lily is an angel, but Noah is difficult, as he’d rather be at home with his friends and new dad. At the park they climb a fence with a warning on it and are rounded up by the military. Upon their release they are accosted by Charlie Frost (Harrelson), a crazy conspiracy theorist who also operates a radio station out of his trailer, and he shares some tales of doom and gloom. Shortly after Jackson drops the kids at home he sees things Frost spoke about and drives back, and here the mayhem starts. They race the limousine through the streets of Los Angeles while everything around them simply disintegrates. Buildings fall over, roads collapse, everything just goes south, spectacularly so.

They escape by the grace of the special effects artists (for one of multiple similar escapes during the movie), and head to Yellowstone, to find out more from Charlie Frost, but Yellowstone has become a super-volcano, spectacular again. Following the puzzle pieces they now head towards China, where the combined governments of the planet have been building ships to carry large groups of people to safety in case of 2012 predictions actually happening. And here short bits of the capitalistic nature of humans are displayed, as it seems that only the rich have passage (but then there has to be a hell of a lot of billionaires on earth).

There is no spoiler for this movie, it is only special effects and zero emotional attachment. If characters hardly lament the death of a (seemingly) loved character, then why should the audience? How on earth can a Cesna plane survive flying inside a pyroclastic cloud? Where does all the water come from to cover the Himalayas? What kind of material is the ships constructed of to float so high in (on) the water? How do you ramp a limousine like that without breaking the car’s body clear in two (or three)? How do you get emotionally attached to characters with only 5 minutes of screen-time (frantically running around rather than really acting)? Why would a nobility speech from the Braveheart battlefield convince the scheming elitist rich folk to open their ship for more refugees to come aboard?

So in essence, apart from three beautifully emotional moments (and I mean moments, blink and you miss it) between father and son, 2012 offers zero emotional punch. The special effects are brilliant, but that is what we have come to expect, and even the best special effects can be spoiled by one piece of bad effects (two cases in point being The Mummy Returns (bad CGI Scorpion King) and The Day After Tomorrow (bad CGI wolves)). 2012 does not have such a point, however, and from a purely visual point of view this movie is entertaining. Just do not expect anything else, including for anything to make scientific sense.