2012
Give 2012 a little credit: It doesn’t end with John Cusack and company embracing Jesus before being wiped out by 1s and 0s.
Nor does it, despite the climactic appearance of arks and the occasional muttered scripture, wallow around in Left Behind-esque mumbo jumbo. (We already got enough of all that in the far more repugnant Knowing.)
It doesn’t even really fetishize mass human carnage. Seven billion people may perish over the butt-numbing two and a half hours, but you barely see felled bodies.
It’s all about huge tracts of land tumbling into the earth’s core or rampaging biblical floods, not about the scores of people dying on or under them. Because thinking about genocide on that scale would be massively unpleasant, right?
Okay, niceties over.
Roland Emmerich’s third rogering of the planet is a hard-earned nadir, even as it raises the stakes. It’s not just Independence Day’s aliens or The Day After Tomorrow’s global warming shenanigans, but instead bullshit doomsday postulations. The Mayan calendar, we’re told, ends around 2012. (Actually, it was originally calculated at 2003 but, dammit, we’re still here.) So the world does too, with a sometimes talented cast (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in particular, is trying way too hard) scrambling to get to China, pronounced as the last land mass to sink below ocean level. Science, it seems, has failed to predict an overheating core and resultant shifting crust, accurately foreseen by ancient civilization and street crazies, and only the wealthy, prominent and/or dashing can survive.
Clearly this was intended as the ne plus ultra of disaster movies, but while the film averages either a spectacularly destroyed city or scenic locale per reel, it’s shockingly dull and straight-faced. Excepting Woody Harrelson’s mountain man conspiracy theorists and Zlatko Buric’s oily Russian billionaire, the film lacks the crass one-note caricatures of the genre, leaving us with boring, interchangable screamers with banal problems. (Cusack’s tries to patch things up with ex Amanda Peet, blah blah.)
This setup leads the writers into one creative corner after another. No less than three protracted suspense sequences feature a plane trying to outrace a crumbling runway, while the bleating, endless climax, lasting over two reels, features as its main dramatic apotheosis—wait for it—a stalled gate.
Rarely has the extinction of most of the planet’s population been so meh. D+
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