Movie Review: “2012″
Rating: 19
As it turns out, the world ends stupidly. It ends with sight gags such as a couple arguing in a grocery store, the husband saying, “I feel like something is coming between us,” and the ground opening up. It ends with the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy crashing into the White House. It ends with a failed novelist outrunning giant cracks in the Earth, driving a Bentley on a glacier and saving the last vestiges of humanity from a harsh meeting with the business end of the Himalayas. And it all happens three years from now, in “2012.”
In director Roland Emmerich’s end-of-world view, disaster can only be meaningful if easily identifiable architecture and geography falls down and goes boom. All of this is seen through the eyes of bedraggled common man Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), an unsuccessful writer who lost his wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and children to Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Gordon Silberman (Tom McCarthy). Now, Jackson is reduced to driving a limousine and listening to an Art Bell-style crackpot who believes the end of the world is nigh.
Meanwhile, geophysicist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) knows that Earth’s core is heating up. Helmsley is the hero who warned the president’s chief of staff, Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), that extreme measures were needed to save humanity. An ambitious, vaguely biblical escape plan is under way, but most civilians just think they are experiencing standard “earthquake weather” in Los Angeles and need to “move back to Wisconsin.”
But because Jackson is a sneaky fellow with loose standards when it comes to hiking in protected areas, he knows something. He is also an astoundingly good limo driver who can beat a rapidly developing ground fissure as it rips up boulevards in West L.A., and Gordon, who has only piloted a plane once before, flies the family’s escape craft as if he were the Blue Angels’ star aviator.
The end of the world is not a personal horror in “2012.” What happens onscreen has no more emotional resonance than the implosion of an old Las Vegas hotel. When Gordon manages to co-pilot a Russian cargo plane out of a cratering Vegas, he has a little chuckle when his landing gear grazes the fake Eiffel Tower. When conspiracy radio host Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) gets knocked off a mountain by a thermal blast, the result is pure vaudeville. The end of days is so apocalyptically hilarious that more than 6 billion people die laughing.
Nothing less than total annihilation can be expected from Emmerich, whose aliens demolished national monuments in “Independence Day,” whose big lizard took Manhattan in “Godzilla” and whose deep freeze gave Earth the big chill in “The Day After Tomorrow.” In a sense, “2012” is the climactic act by modern popcorn cinema’s greatest force for havoc. Everything is laid to waste, including physical science, dramatic tension and a certain amount of Cusack’s reputation as an actor with taste and scruples. But Cusack is not alone. Ejiofor, Peet, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover (as the unluckiest U.S. president in history) and Platt all deserve better than spouting exposition and engaging in emotionally lackluster subplots in Emmerich’s pageant of destruction.
As T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men,” “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” In John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a thoughtful, terrifying and deeply emotional look at a harsh and unforgiving post-apocalyptic world, humanity is at low ebb, whimpering but still raggedly alive. Compared to such a lyrical treatment of end times, “2012” is just a long series of big, dumb bangs.
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Comments
I would advise everyone to hold the cheese with their nacho’s because there is plenty in this movie. Cusack escapes cracking roads in a stretch limo and a camper van but when he does it a few times on run ways in airplanes it gets a little bit boring and repetitive. This film looks like the story line was written to fit the effects scenes (surely not). After this I’m not going to watch another one of these films because they are simply forgettable. I don’t care if the world melts in 3D graphics if the story line is cribbed from the last disaster movie then it is always going to be depressing watching the president fly off to safety in Air Force One while we all burn, drown, get crushed or choke on Twinkie’s listening to Fox News.
It’s a good movie, if you don’t leave the that theater wanting to tell your family you love them, then you are like Mr. Carl Anheuser in the movie. It’s a story about humanity and coming together.
im 21 and seen lots of film but this has to be the best film i have ever seen storiy line was amazing the whole film was just spectacular grafixs wer pefect you must see it and take it all in . i give this film a 9.8 out of 10 wich is onley because no film is perfect but this was very close .!!
This movie sucked! So fake and boring. What a waste of money. You would think that such an easy pick( the public’s fear of 2012) would give way to a vivid realization of the end; instead I was waiting for the end of the stupid movie. I walked out 1 hour into this piece of ___ before I wasted my precious last days another min. F-
the movie was done excellent performes
iam thinking that these kind films i want more