2012 Movie Review

Written on November 17, 2009 by Marc Eastman in Movies

Roland Emmerich‘s 2012 brings together the end of the world and government conspiracy in a way not particularly explored before. It also, I must imagine, breaks the record for how many people die in a film. Unfortunately, this is pretty well where the positive discussion of the film ends, and hopefully, you didn’t realize it had begun.

Our story begins a few years ago with the discovery that the sun is starting to do weird things, and the short version of the story is that there isn’t much time left until the Earth starts going through a monumentally unhappy time. The world is, more or less, going to end. The governments of the world are notified, and the politicians begin planning their plans. A key part of their plan is to make sure no one finds out. Jump forward to the present day, and as things are coming to a head (quite a bit ahead of schedule), we meet Jackson Curtis (John Cusack).

We meet Jackson as he is on his way to pick up his kids for a camping trip. He’s divorced, but has a fairly good relationship with his ex-wife… except that there’s another guy in the picture… and his kids like him. As events unfold, Jackson is witness to some strange government goings-on, unusual seismic activity, an end-of-the-world preaching kook in a camper, and a billionaire’s snotty brat who tells Jackson that they are going on a big ship and he’s going to die. 1 + 1 + 1 + more Earthquake activity, and Jackson is getting the hell out of Dodge.

Our story bounces back and forth between Jackson (and family) and Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the scientist who brought the findings to the government in the first place. Basically, Jackson runs like crazy, and Adrian is our in to the government activities and so on. For quite a long haul of the movie’s ungodly 158 minute run we aren’t sure what sort of the scheme the governments of the world have come up with, but we know something big is going on. Our trip along Adrian’s part of this ride slowly exposes us to the general plan, and as disaster sneaks up sooner than expected, Adrian finds he didn’t exactly know the plan in any case.

Cusack and Ejiofor give their all to this film, and both provide several moments of interest, but despite their well above-average efforts, there’s no saving this film. Solid supporting roles by Oliver Platt and Danny Glover make no difference either. Leaving out the fluke The Patriot, this is simply the same cornball lunacy Emmerich always churns out, it’s just longer and more people die. 10,000 B.C., Godzilla, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Universal Soldier… it’s just the same thing, different day here. Slightly different platitudes, somewhat different mode of death and destruction, but the same filmmaking ability.

Ultimately, the final product here might have come together in a way that made for a worthwhile bit of fun, but it has a few major problems. I don’t know that it serves a real purpose to go into all of them, but the main stumbling blocks are that it is too long and too serious. At some point it isn’t about attention span anymore (though that is sorely tested at 2 hours and 40 minutes as well), but simple desensitization. Watch a firework show for 10 hours, and tell me how cool that last one was.

Everything in the world is destroyed in this movie, and it’s what’s on the screen an unbelievable amount of the time. Worse, nearly everything that gets destroyed misses Jackson by one inch. Whether a 60-story building falls down, or balls of lava are shooting through the sky, you’d need C-3PO to come up with the odds Jackson overcame with what happened to him here.

The real problem is, like much of Emmerich’s work, that the movie just doesn’t know what tone it should have. As with something like Godzilla, this is at best a fairly cornball idea, and a film equivalent of a ride at a theme park. That’s what it should be anyway. But, this is a thrill ride with serious delusions of grandeur, and the result is that you not only can’t take it seriously, but you’re soon noticing that you’re actually fairly bored.

All that said, it’s not a particularly bad movie. It’s somewhere a bit below-average perhaps, but the fact that it makes it so hard to have any fun with it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It’s not really the kind of movie that you’re likely to hate, and not that bad as far as ways to spend an evening go, but at some point you’ll probably realize that you could have spent your time watching two other movies… and I don’t think you’ll find it a fair trade.

Rating:

Are You Screening?

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On a related note -

A blog post came my way today that makes rather a good point, and I wanted to touch on the general idea.

Jordan Hoffman’s post at UGO can be found here.

The title of his post is Why Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is better than 2012, and he raises a worthwhile issue in his general purpose.

You may recall my posting defending Transformers from Roger Ebert and his Brainiac post on his blog, and here is another example to add to that discussion.

Ebert, who gave it to the Transformers sequel over and over, gave 2012 3.5 our of 4 stars, and it eventually becomes difficult to take things seriously. There’s something funny going on if this movie is not only miles better than Revenge of the Fallen, but gets the next to best possible rating. As only one consideration of the curiousness of the situation, every negative factor reported as that which makes Fallen so bad could be applied to 2012. In fact, I’m not sure how you would avoid it.

Just to be clear on my own position, these are both nonsensical, popcorn rides. It’s explosions, special effects, a thin plot that isn’t demanding, and basically just a bit of wild fun and excitement… theoretically. Neither of them is particularly good, nor outrageously bad. The difference is that I had more fun watching Fallen, and it knew what it was. 2012 really thinks it has something to say, and that’s either laughable, or it’s convinced you’re really stupid.