2012 Arrives Early

One might be excused for wondering what, exactly, German director Roland Emmerich has against the United States. After all, his films (such as Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow) famously show American icons such as the White House and the Statue of Liberty being destroyed.

With his new film 2012, Emmerich ups the ante, depicting a global disaster caused by terrestrial instability. The film is basically a retelling of the Noah’s Ark flood story, and has nothing to do with the date 2012. It could have been set in 1995 or 2013, but the 2012 angle made a perfect hook for the film: Why not tie it in with the supposed end of the world, allegedly tied to the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012?

John Cusack stars as Jackson Curtis, a Los Angeles writer whose failed novel broke up his marriage. Jackson wants to reunite with his family, and ends up going (almost literally) to the ends of the earth to save them. At the same time in Washington D.C., the president’s chief science advisor, Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), discovers the impending danger in the earth’s unsettled tectonic plates. He butts heads with the chief of staff over when the information should be made public, and who they should tell first. Woody Harrelson and Danny Glover fill out a few of the cameo roles, as a nutjob radio show conspiracy theorist and the President of the United States, respectively.

The film tackles a variety of weighty questions, such as: If the end of the world was coming, what would you do? If only the government knew, who should be told? If there was a way that some people could survive, who should decide who lives and who dies? These are interesting questions, but unfortunately get lost amid the film’s shouting and explosions and crashes. About a half dozen subplots appear, several of them awkwardly aborted in the rush to get to the disaster scenes.

Then there are the implausibilities—and I’m not even talking about Los Angeles sliding into the ocean in such a cinematic fashion. Jackson Curtis has more lives than James Bond and Indiana Jones put together, as he literally outruns fireballs and earthquakes, saving the day with each step. But my favorite eye-roller is when almost the entire world has been consumed by fire and flood—except, apparently, the parts that allow a last-minute cell phone call so that two lead characters can share one last scene together.

But to criticize a disaster film-—especially one like this—-for being implausible is itself a bit silly. People don’t go to disaster movies to see rich emotional tapestry or Memento-like airtight logic; they go to see stuff get blowed up. And on that level, it succeeds. Destroying the world is not easy, and the filmmakers used a variety of special effects techniques to bring global disaster to the big screen. Some of the scenes are remarkably effective (a shot of a giant wave overtaking a cruise ship is genuinely chilling, reminding me of The Perfect Storm), while others just look like a cartoony video game.

The audience doesn’t have to wait too long for the action. Soon Los Angeles is destroyed with crashing waves and volcanoes and bottomless pits opening up in supermarkets and along highways; virtually any disaster you can think of (with the exception of the swine flu and Sarah Palin) appears at some point or other. The film is very loud and bloated with too many explosions, too many Big Ideas, and too many characters. 2012 is the mother of all epic disaster movies, and if that’s what you’re looking for, 2012 has it.

You can see my interview with 2012 director Roland Emmerich on the Web HERE.