November 30, 2009: 2012
I certainly haven’t been waiting and hoping, and don’t necessarily get any pleasure from the opportunity, to declare a film to be ridiculously ridiculous. But that’s exactly what 2012 is. Is it even a spoiler for this kind of movie if I tell the reader that in the scene with the boat (yes, I said boat) trying to steer clear of a crash into the peak of Mount Everest, they just barely make it in time?
2012 speaks to the oft-made claim that the world will end in said year, and in this film the “end” manifests itself as a devastating heating of the earth’s core, essentially causing all land to break up and then be covered over by water as the polar ice caps completely melt and tectonic plates shift. Major governments learn of this impending doom years ahead of time, and dispute behind closed doors how to handle the revelation of this news to the world. John Cusack is a moderately successful novelist who gets wrapped up in trying to save himself and his family as things literally start to crumble around him.
Imagine if you will, every POSSIBLE disaster movie cliché, every POSSIBLE implausible scientific point that happens only in the movies, and every POSSIBLE combination of vehicles (airplanes, cars, trucks, boats) narrowly escaping the certain doom of gaping chasms and giant waves of water and massive explosions and eruptions and anything else you can imagine that might kill people or destroy vehicles. All of these are contained in this one movie. Oh, and did I mention the crazy bug-eyed guy who claims that the end of the world is nigh, and turns out to be right? How about the privileged billionaire foreign businessman who shockingly also happens to be evil, who thinks he has bought his way out of the tragedy but gets his comeuppance at the end? The President of the United States valiantly helping his fellow citizens, and sacrificing himself in the process? The daring suicidal underwater dive to fix a jammed piece of equipment which is threatening the lives of thousands? It’s all here.
The funny thing is, even as bad as this movie was, it was definitely entertaining, though I certainly won’t be rushing to see it again. I laughed a LOT more here than I did in The Hangover (it pains my heart to see the number of critics’ 2009 top 10 lists on which that film appears), although I must admit that a good deal of the entertainment factor for me came from my friend having to suffer through it as well – he doesn’t dismiss this type of waste of time as easily as I do. He had been considering seeing a second film later that evening, but then didn’t want to ruin his contemplation of 2012 by seeing something that was potentially good.
And there was plenty here to think about as well. In the unfolding worldwide disaster scenario, people are getting hung up on the lives of individuals when it’s known that millions or billions have already died, which seems counterintuitive, but I realized that in the midst of such a massive disaster, individual hope and the possibility to help whoever you can help would be the only thing you have at that time. It’s also intriguing to realize that even though huge numbers of people would die immediately, plenty would survive for at least a while, scattered in oceans but with some reaching land, and they might be able to pull themselves back up again. John Cusack is the hero in the film, trying to do right by his daughter and his ex-wife, and eventually seeing eye to eye with her new husband (before he is crushed to death in a giant set of gears, leaving the original family to reunite at the “end” of the crisis). Chiwetel Ejiofor carries the “good guy” torch in the world of the government authorities, advocating the scientific point of view to the politicians, primarily Oliver Platt’s unsympathetic but not quite evil White House Chief of Staff. Mind you, it’s entirely clear right from the start who is going to live and who is going to die in this disaster, so the only surprise is just how brutal any particular death will be.
I could ask a whole bunch of technical “Are you kidding me?” questions, but it would be pointless. Science is just a convenient plot device here, perverted and distorted to suit the particular action set piece of the moment, be it fiery, watery, or rocky. There are WAY too many situations in which the main characters are just barely outrunning explosions or earthquakes or volcanoes or expanding crevasses, or planes barely taking off or barely staying aloft or outrunning smoke or volcanoes – I estimate that this basic scenario played out 20 times or more in this 2.5-hour movie. Add to this Cusack basically phoning in his performance, and there’s not a lot of charisma to tie everything together and make us care about any of it. To give credit where credit is due, though, Danny Glover did turn in a nicely understated performance as the US President.
I didn’t necessarily want to write a long review here, but there was a lot to say. To summarize, though, the thing I had the most trouble with in this film was that throughout the runtime, I was preoccupied with what could possibly be presented as the obligatory “happy” ending to this film. Billions of people died, along with much of the other flora and fauna on the earth. Some thousands of people survived, and we were led to believe that they could resettle on land after a while. But after such a massive geological event, wouldn’t there still be turmoil (volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis) all over the earth’s crust for hundreds or perhaps many thousands of years to come? Gee, I guess a happy family reunited and safe together on a boat makes it all OK.
Makes Armageddon seem plausible and intelligent.
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