Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/20/09
Let
me get this out of the way up front: we once face one of these choices
that comes along every few years between recognizing that when the world
ends it's not going to be because of somebody's calendar and getting all
whipped into a frenzy over the idea that, yet again, The World As We Know
It is down to its' last few pages of adorable kitten pictures hanging on
our kitchen walls. While you'd think the Millennium would have taught
us all a thing or two about the way the world doesn't end, people are once
again gripping over the fact that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21,
2012, as if it didn't have to end at some time since the empire that built
it stopped putting out new editions quite some time ago. We do get
a couple of compensations for the coming apocalyptic crackpot festival,
one being that it gives Chris Carter an excuse to pitch a new X-Files
movie to 20th Century Fox (the series having predicted an alien invasion
on that date) and it's allowed Roland Emmerich to complete the End of the
World As We Know It Trilogy he began with the popcorn masterpiece Independence
Day and continued with the loopy but breathtaking The Day After
Tomorrow. File 2012 under loopy but breathtaking, but
when it's rolling, it delivers more disastrous bang for your ticket dollar
than just about any movie ever made. Sure, it's got a disaster movie's
callous disregard for the value of human lives that don't belong to the
stars and at around the 2/3 mark turns into Poseidon 2, but, like
its' Trilogy predecessors, it's jam-packed with likable stars doing their
best and the whole package is neatly wrapped with Emmerich's trademark
“Aw, come on, it's just the end of the world” wink. He still misses
his ID4/Stargate writing collaborator Dean Devlin, but 2012
is one of Emmerich's best movies and delivers everything you could possibly
ask for in a doomsday blockbuster before it starts offering stuff you might
prefer to send back to the kitchen.
Jackson
Curtis (John Cusack) is a failed novelist. Oh, sure, he's been published,
but his novel Farewell, Atlantis didn't even sell 500 copies, and
he ruined his marriage to Kate (Amanda Peet) with his single-minded focus
on his work. Now, they're linked only through their children Noah
(Liam James) and Lilly (Morgan Lily) and she's moved on to a relationship
with plastic surgeon Gordon (Tom McCarthy). Jackson has the kids
for the weekend and takes them to Yellowstone while the events we saw predicted
in the opening scenes start to catch up: earthquakes with no tectonic
cause shake LA and lakes in the National Park start drying up. The
leaders of the world, including US President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover)
have known this was coming for three years thanks to the efforts of geologist
Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), one of the handful of people who read
Jackson's book. Solar flares have been cooking the Earth's core,
which will in turn cause the crust to destabilize, essentially causing
the entire planet to collapse in on itself in a flurry of earthquakes,
supervolcanoes and tsunamis. Jackson meets conspiracy buff and radio
talk show host Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), who lays it all out for
him, and when Kate calls with news of a massive quake that split the supermarket
she and Gordon were shopping at in half, he brings the kids home.
It quickly becomes clear to the writer that Charlie's not just any old
nut, and he grabs the family and stays one step ahead of the massive implosion
of Los Angeles. Pushing Gordon's one lesson flying a single-engine
plane to its' limit, they escape back to Yellowstone, where Charlie had
claimed to have a map of where massive ships are being built to allow the
privileged to ride out the calamity. But Old Faithful is THISCLOSE
to becoming the center of history's largest supervolcano, and that's not
the last disaster that stands between the Curtis family and safety.
As the world crumbles around them, Washington bigwig Carl Anheuser (Oliver
Platt) is determined to ensure that only those who can afford a billion
Euro ticket find their way aboard those Arks.
First,
the important part: you're going to see 2012 to experience
that vicarious thrill of standing back behind the safety of a movie screen
to see just what it would look like if the ground gave way under an imaginary
planet full of people and their entire civilization collapsed into the
sea. And you're going to get that thrill in spades. The sequence
where Jackson, Kate, Gordon and the kids flee a collapsing Los Angeles
as his limousine stays just inches ahead of disaster is nothing less than
one of the greatest action sequences ever committed to film. All
around the car, we watch unthinkable sights as buildings, freeways and
bridges implode with amazing realism (you can even see tiny little people
clinging to the collapsing structures). I know, I know, some of you
will never be able to understand why this sort of thing is entertaining.
And I'm sure that if I'd ever lost a loved one to a natural disaster, I
might feel the same way just as anyone who's been shot probably loses their
taste for big-screen gunplay. But the point is that the destruction
is so amazingly realistic and so amazingly impossible while posing such
an unfathomable threat to the characters we're rooting for that my brain
comes to a razor's edge of rejecting what I'm seeing but can't because
it just looks so damn real! More amazing thrills at Yellowstone and
Las Vegas (and, of course, that whole aircraft carrier crushing the White
House thing) follow a strong half hour of setup, and up to this point,
2012 is pure popcorn nirvana.
Alas,
the good times don't last forever, and what follows becomes increasingly
bogged down in the logistics of getting to the Arks, and then a very first-draft
treatment of the life and death struggles at Ark Central. Two pivotal
life-threatening things happen there, but they trip over each other like
crazy when a moment's thought shows that crisis #1 should simply be eliminated
because it muddies a cause-and-effect relationship between Jackson and
Helmsley that should really sing. Granted, the movie's already too
long at over 150 minutes, but most of the ideas introduced by Anheuser's
plan to make the Arks post-apocalyptic Titanics with no steerage don't
get enough time to be fully developed. And, of course, when
push comes to shove, Emmerich and his 10,000 BC
co-writer Harold Kloser take characters who've been able to dance between
the raindrops of Armageddon for 2 hours and start killing them with actions
so indiscriminate they might as well be dying of broken ankles. Without
giving too much away, I think the filmmakers miscalculate regarding which
characters the audience will bond with, and dispatch some of their most
likable creations without throwing them the slightest bone of compensatory
heroism. At least they look out for the dog.
Cusack
and Peet are quirky, likable actors who've shined when paired in the past
(in Identity and Martian Child). They don't work so well as 2012's
more conventional couple, and Kate gets little to do but run and hold her
children close. Cusack gets a better role, and his ironic smart/slacker
persona makes him the perfect front man for a movie designed to entertain
us with unspeakable tragedy. Harrelson is a hoot as the conspiracy
nut who gets to say he was right, Glover is appropriately stately as the
President, and Platt appropriately odious as the administration hatchet
man who sees fate hand him a chance to reign in hell. Ejiofor shines
as the scientist with the courage of his convictions even at the end of
the world. And McCarthy is far better than his third-wheel role demands,
making the nervous plastic surgeon pushed to levels of heroism far, far
beyond his pay grade one of the movie's best characters.
But,
oh, those special effects. It can be argued that Emmerich's disaster
trilogy features diminishing human interest from film to film as the quality
and execution of the carnage keeps getting better and better, and it's
hard to imagine that a major world city will ever be more astonishingly
leveled on film than 2012's demolition of LA. This could have
been a much better movie than it is (Dr. Phil, get to work on an Emmerich/Devlin
reconciliation, STAT!), but for what it delivers, it has no peer.
Once 12/21/12 goes by without incident and the crackpots circle the next
last day of creation on their calendars, at least we'll have Roland Emmerich
to show us how much fun The End can be. |
