2012
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser
Producers: Harald Kloser, Mark Gordon, Larry J. Franco
Stars: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Tom McCarthy, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Liam James, Morgan Lily, Zlatko Burić, Beatrice Rosen
I lost count of the number of times characters in 2012 ran in from somewhere off-camera and exclaimed “You have to see this!” I didn’t like this movie but I am impressed by it, since it so expansively delivers on that exact carny sideshow pitch Hollywood has been honing since Jaws. Month after month and year after year they promise spectacular violence and catastrophe enjoyed from the safe vantage point of a comfortable multiplex chair. It’s less about entertainment then a sense of destiny created by its own awesome ridiculousness: good or not, you HAVE to see this.
The movie exists as a kind of evolutionary endpoint for Earth-centric cataclysm as a big-screen activity. After a first act consisting of ominous portents, grim world leaders Preparing For the End, and Ordinary Mortals played by famous actors laying out their various subplots, the movie merrily proceeds to spend two hours glamorously and thoroughly destroying the Mother Planet with all the glee of a kid torpedoing toy boats in the bathtub.
Buildings crack and tumble, oceans rise, continents shift, background extras scream and perish by the billions, and the boys in the effects department punch up what must take the prize for the largest fireball any human ever outran in slow motion. Who else would direct this deathstravaganza but Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow’s own Roland Emmerich, a filmmaker who has never had anything more sophisticated to say to moviegoers than “BOOOOM!”
It all begins with that Emmerich trademark of a science-y person seeing something on a computer monitor and responding to it with gaping horror. In this case, one of the science-y people is Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who works for the American government. What he learns, at an underground copper mine in India, is that particles which previously passed harmlessly through other things are now doing something else! This promises nothing short of global doom, and who really cares how it works, because the timing of it coincides with a well-publicized prophecy that the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012. This is actually fifty pounds of hooey, in case you were worried, but it sells books.
Helmsley races to Washington, D.C. to inform the President (Danny Glover) and his chief-of-staff (Oliver Platt), who proceed to act out one of the most ludicrous of Hollywood fantasies: that a government official would take anything a scientist says that calls for expensive action seriously. But they all believe unquestioningly, based on a single thin file folder Helmsley carries, that 99-point-several-9’s percent of humanity is two years away from being melted, crushed, or drowned. With some positive thinking and a few trillion dollars, they might be able to save a select few. This is the point in humanity’s story when it’s good to have the right kind of friends.
At the unconnected end of the potential survivors’ pool is Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a struggling writer who drives a limousine to pay the bills. As someone who has had that exact job in his own struggles to sustain a writing career, I feel very affirmed to see this movie depict my kind as earnest, resourceful, and the type of man Amanda Peet would enthusiastically make babies with. They are now separated, but when he takes the kids out to Yellowstone National Park on weekend holiday, they find that the government has fenced off a very ominous and smoky area, and that a local conspiracy theorist living in a camper has some wild ideas about what it all means. I think the reason that Curtis even gives the man the time of day is that he is played by Woody Harrelson, who is ever-so-good at zealotry.
Camper Man provides him with one 2, and when the son of his employer, a brutish Russian tycoon (Zlatko Burić), lets slip a hint about the existence of some highly exclusive sailing craft, that provides the 2 with which Curtis adds up a most harrowing 4, and off he races to get his children, ex-wife, and her new boyfriend (Thomas McCarthy) out of Los Angeles.
This escape is mounted with jaw-dropping scope. As they speed across a Los Angeles that is literally falling into the Earth, trying to reach a waiting airplane, one five-minute sequence contains more hair’s-breadth escapes than most whole action franchises. You wonder what Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser do in Los Angeles all day, staring at it and wondering down to the level of individual street lamps how it would all look when it crumbles.
But as the Curtis family’s flight for safety turns global, and an ensemble of characters demonstrate the uncanny ability to keep running into one another even as Earth’s surface gets mashed-up by earthquakes and tornadoes and tsunamis and radiation, you realize that what the filmmakers are depicting with all these expensive effects ultimately boils down to dumb luck. Curtis seems a decent fellow, but I’m quite sure many of those who were crushed by that rolling aircraft carrier were scrappy and clever and loved their kids.
I’m not saying it isn’t competently made – these are professionals, and they have successfully made exactly the movie they set out to make. It is loud and it is relentless, it is fattened with sap and cliché and inappropriate cutesy humor, and it is even kind of fun once your brain has been pounded into a soft enough mush. But when the culling starts, values, plans, and dreams mean nothing. The only thing that gives you a decent chance of surviving 2012 is fame. So is it any wonder what people will go through to get on Reality TV?