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2012 Review
10 Nov 2009
Critics rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
2012

Brush up on your front crawl.

That’s the key recommendation we can take from 2012, the latest catastrophe from the accident-prone Roland Emmerich.

The German-born filmmaker imagined an alien invasion in Independence Day (1996), let loose a prehistoric monster in New York (Godzilla, 1998), and then pulled a second ice age out of his hat for The Day After Tomorrow (2004).

In 2012 he’s destroying the earth all over again. This time the culprit isn’t climate change, but geology. Giant sunbursts will heat up the molten core of the planet, causing terrible earthquakes, huge tsunamis, and crustal displacement on a scale mankind has never seen.

Cast details

Crustal displacement? Try imagining California as a Pacific marine park… Washington DC submerged by the Atlantic… the South Pole relocating to the mid-West and a great wave rolling over the Himalayas.

Not so long ago it would have taken an act of imagination too. But these days, CGI can do all the heavy lifting. Back in 1996 we were impressed when Emmerich blew up the White House. Now he can send fissures running out through the streets of LA, watch them deepend into cracks and chasms, and decimate the entire city for our entertainment.

It is entertaining, too, I have to admit, though if Emmerich made it even a little more realistic we’d probably be throwing up in the aisles.

The first half of the movie is the most fun. John Cusack is one of those un-appreciated novelists you meet in the movies some times, one Jack Curtis. He’s a divorced dad who cuts short his camping trip with his two kids when California starts falling apart.

Pausing only to pick up his ex (an underemployed Amanda Peet) and her new fella (Thomas McCarthy), Jack skips town in a twin prop plane and – long story short – they try to find where the rich people and the world’s political elite are headed.

Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor

There’s a deeply plausible cynicism about the idea that the plutocracy would furnish themselves with an escape route without letting the rest of us in on the secret. In a neat rejoinder, one senior government official defends the morality of harbouring the wealthy by pointing out that it was only by selling tickets to private citizens that they could ensure the ships would be built on such a tight deadline. (In China, of course.)

The US President – Danny Glover – elects to stay with his doomed people of course, though not before putting his daughter (Thandie Newton) on the evacuation list. Valiant geologist Chiwetel Ejiofor is our other main point of contact, a White House advisor whose main function is to put a human face on the political exodus.

One of the few filmmakers who is probably rich enough to get himself a safe berth, Steven Spielberg isn’t mentioned by name but his influence is written all over the screen. Emmerich gives a wink to Jaws (“We’re gonna need a bigger plane”), but borrows expansively and expensively from Close Encounters and War of the Worlds (especially the dubious notion that we can stomach the death of billions and still savour a happy ending if a deadbeat dad is reunited with his family). There’s also a superfluous subplot straight from The Poseidon Adventure, and a couple of flooding scenes that James Cameron might lay claim to.

Trashier than Spielberg, Emmerich makes no bones about surfing the zeitgeist.

Trashier than Spielberg, Emmerich makes no bones about surfing the zeitgeist. 2012 is stuffed to the gills with buzz words and topicalities, whether it’s an African American President, the Chinese constructing dams in Tibet, hotshot Indian scientists, or the Ukranian tycoon (Zlatko Buric from Pusher II and III) who offers some hope to Jack et al.

So long as it mixes satire with cheese the movie has some of the smack of a deluxe B movie. But as the film drags on and on, Emmerich?s weakness for sentimentality, speechifying, and spectacle turns it into a long and gruelling grind.

Once you’ve destroyed the US of A, it’s hard to keep topping yourself and the crazy paving effects here just don’t have enough variety to keep us wowed. (It’s a sign of desperation, surely, that Emmerich resorts to video for the climax.) Long before the 158-minute mark this viewer was praying that the end really was nigh.

2012 Reviews

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