Movie Review - '2012'
Friday, November 13, 2009
A common complaint leveled at movie critics, almost exclusively with big budget blockbusters, is that we expect them to be something they're not. True, not everything tries to win Oscars and bad acting and writing can often be overlooked, but some films are so bad even on the basis that they should be evaluated that you can only forgive so much in the interest of entertainment. Within its own little universe, 2012 really only wants to create the apocalypse to end all apocalypses, and it's pretty successful at it, frankly. Director Roland Emmerich is The Master of Disaster, having helmed a few movies that put human civilization on the brink of extinction from one cause or another. There's always an unlikely hero, seldom a likely one, and familiar monuments get demolished rather convincingly through computer animation. There's always a scientist who knows how it will play out, and somehow amid all of this, there's romance in bloom. As you might suspect, 2012 is loosely inspired by the end of the Mayan calendar, which goes dark in December of that year. Some of the scientific theories at work here exist, although they may be shady. Still, unless you know these things going in, it seems fairly plausible: The sun is basically cooking the crust of the Earth and eventually - say, December 2012 - it will finally give way and everything will start to move uncontrollably. You probably don't know there are nearly 10,000 earthquakes a day because most of that movement is so minor you never feel it. But it's always moving, and we know California is overdue for "the big one." So why not? Now, in Emmerich's world where all this is set in motion, does the movie work? More often than it doesn't, and that might be a surprise. Considering his film is over two-and-a-half hours long, it holds together pretty well. That doesn't mean 2012 doesn't have its problems or that the things our survivors live through are in any way acceptable, but the movie just keeps rolling on, and when Emmerich does slow down so we can catch our breath, these characters aren't that bad. There's struggling novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), who drives a limo for a Russian tycoon. He first suspects something's wrong when he and he kids are detained by the Army at gunpoint during a trip to Yellowstone. While there, he meets geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is leading the government's research into a disturbing trend of rising temperatures under the Earth's surface. He knows what it means, but doesn't know how imminent the danger is.
