company: Columbia Pictures
year: 2009
runtime: 158′
country: United States
director: Roland Emmerich
cast: John Cusack, Amanda Peet,
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton,
Oliver Platt, Thomas McCarthy,
Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover
writers: Roland Emmerich
and Harald Kloser
cinematographer: Dean Semler
out in wide release
Warning: This article probably contains some spoilers.
Plot: An increase in solar activity coupled with a rare galactic alignment showers Earth with neutrinos, heating up the core of the planet and causing its crust (and its magnetic poles) to catastrophically shift. The world’s governments work together to preserve some semblance of humanity.
Roland Emmerich seems to have the dubious title of reigning king of the contemporary disaster genre, in spite of having only directed a few films on the subject. His penchant for destruction on a global scale reaches dizzyingly absurd new heights in 2012, coupling a near bottomless production budget with a script that wouldn’t pass muster with a When Time Ran Out-era Irwin Allen with consistently hilarious and occasionally awe-inspiring results.
The narrative plays like a lopsided retread of the 1951 classic When Worlds Collide, only with pesky subatomic particles in the place of invading heavenly bodies. Whereas the focus of that film was on the vast public works project to construct the humanity-saving space ark, 2012 zeros in on the disaster early and often – the ground quakes and oceans rise while familiar edifices of civilization crumble into oblivion.
Throughout Emmerich strives to retain a sense of immediacy, with the action revolving primarily about a broken family (Cusak, Peet, and McCarthy as a father, mother, and stepfather, with two preteen kids along for good measure) and their journey to save themselves. That the father, a part-time chauffeur for a rich Russian and a full-time writer, has penned and published an under-appreciated apocalyptic science fiction novel with an optimistic conclusion ensures us that all the principle players will make it through just fine. The catastrophe even offers up an opportunity to put Cusack and Peet’s marriage back on track, offing step-dad as soon as it’s expedient to the plot.
Providing a secondary view on things is a government scientist (Ejiofor) with a kind heart an eye for the President’s daughter (Thandie Newton). We also, briefly, glimpse things from the prospective of the President himself (an unlikely Danny Glover), himself lost when the USS John F. Kennedy comes tearing across the lawn of the White House. Woody Harrelson even pops up in a minor but important supporting role as a crackpot radio host who just happens to know where Cusack and co. can find safety.
Most of 2012‘s drama falls pretty flat, from the forumlaic broken-family fantasy (the wife really still loves her old husband in spite of having remarried) to a half dozen or so people who realize too late that family ties are all that matter. Characters plainly aren’t, with the accomplished cast struggling to provide them with any dimensionality at all, and most ultimately wind up as fodder for the apocalypse. Here Emmerich presents with a certain cruelty, allowing numerous individuals to think they’ve reached salvation only to have the tables immediately turn on them.
In fact, there’s a nasty streak running through much of the destruction on display in 2012. Emmerich takes obvious glee in plunging millions, even billions of people to their assorted dooms, including a pair of old ladies he sends crashing head-first into a wall for the minor sin of being in front of our escaping heroes. Worse, he seems to want things both ways – tugging at our heartstrings with sad music and teary close-ups between shots of people trying to survive in torrents of debris before widening his scope so that we might revel in the shear spectacle of the thing. It’s an uneasy combination, and one Emmerich isn’t nearly competent enough to pull off. He’d have been better off forgetting such obvious attempts at garnering audience sympathy and just presenting his thrill-ride apocalypse for what it is – pure exploitation.
Emmerich also seems to have a particular bent against the rich and powerful, apparently having realized that public opinion of both is scraping the bottom of the barrel in this time of recession. The sentiment is no different than in the George Pal classic 2012 so obviously emulates. The rich are condemned just for being so, even though the literal arks that save whatever is left of mankind are financed in large part by private backers. That age-old government conspiracy subplot also rears its ugly head, and it takes our kind-hearted scientist to convince world leaders (all of them!) that they should do the right thing and save as many people as they can.
While the drama simmers at a low level throughout the rest of the narrative twists itself into impossible knots of contrivances. We see not one, but three last-minute edge-of-your-seat plane takeoffs of the Independence Day variety, the outrunning of a pyroclastic flow by an RV, and even the shifting of an entire continent some thousands of miles just so our family can make it there reasonably unscathed. The crowining absurd moment comes at the end, when an ark is threatened by a collision with a mountain. What mountain, you ask? Why Everest, of course! In a film like this, no lesser peak will do.
I could gripe about this picture all day, but I won’t, because I was so damned entertained in spite of it all. The expansive CGI work has been credited as “photo-realistic” by some, which is utter baloney, but that doesn’t keep it from being a world of fun just the same – it’s certainly one hell of a cartoon. 2012 explodes Yellowstone, sinks California, and wipes the rest of the world clean with gargantuan tsunamis before it hits the two hour mark. It may struggle for momentum in the ark-bound final act out of a shear lack of more destroy, but memory of what came before is more than enough to pull one through to the end of things.
For Emmerich the world is obviously not enough (perhaps we’ll get a cataclysm on a galactic scale next go around). I may lament its furthering of the popularity of the asinine doom-sayer lunacy surrounding the year in question, but I enjoyed 2012 for what it is – the kind of dumb loud entertainment only a hack like Emmerich can get away with (and he has, again, handily). Art it isn’t, but recommended matinée viewing? Absolutely.
