2012
2012, and Roland Emmerich are prime examples of the exact sort of Hollywood movie I've grown to loathe; all flash and no story. If we simply wanted to show a lot of destruction, we could have cut the dialog from this film and finished watching it in about twenty minutes. It might have been worth seeing then.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought that the cycles on the Mayan calendar indicated not "The end of the world" in a rapture-esque manner that Christians tend to buy into, but rather a reshuffling of the world order in a more spiritual, attitudinal sense. Brief research on the internet indicates that the Mayans simply look at December 2012 as the tripping of their calendar's odometer, like watching your car hit 100,000 miles. I'd love to have a discussion of this with people who are more knowledgeable about it than I am, but not in the tin foil hat/FBI agents are using the fluoride in your toothpaste and flu vaccines to control your mind vein.
At any rate, Emmerich seems to have decided that he can ride the hype and repeat the same dull formula that made him some bucks in Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow. He recruits a new set of actors and directs their careers off a cliff. We'll see if they miraculously escape Emmerich's effect as well as they escaped his special effects.
The movie boils down to this. Everything blows up, and John Cusack and some of the people he travels with barely escape from all of it. I didn't mark it all down, but Cusack manages to outdrive an earthquake and a volcano (the first in a stretch limo, the second in a Winnebago) and then his ex-wife's new boyfriend manages to take off and dodge rampant destruction no less than three times.
They have to ditch an aircraft in the mountains in China and do a Temple of Doom improv scene, before they barely manage to sneak onto one of three giant arks that have been secretly made to hold humanity's expected sole survivors. Once he's on there, he becomes (naturally) the only person on the boat who can save them from certain destruction; a tidal wave has knocked the ark into a collision course with Mount Everest, and Cusack must clear some gears in order for the ark to power up and avoid the rocks. By the time the ark is ponderously inching toward Everest (of course it's Everest! What other mountains are there in the Himalayas?) I was actively rooting for people to die.
I wonder how actors like Cusack wind up in movies like this. He's been in a lot of great films and he's acted well in them, so we know the guy's got talent. Sure, he's been in a dog or two (War, Inc. comes to mind) but at least the film itself was risky in the sense that it was a very off-beat sort of film to make. Cusack signing on to make something like 2012 smells of someone desperate for a quick check. I pray that actors have higher standards, but maybe that's all it really is. Maybe Cusack needed to get real paid for this film, so he could continue to sign onto films with better plots but less box-office draw.
Maybe I'm being silly. Maybe they believe in the film. I have to think Will Smith thought that Independence Day was going to be good work. It certainly made his name a household word. I just can't imagine though that these people look at the script for this movie and say "Yeah, that's gonna be a classic piece of work, and ROLAND EMMERICH is going to be writing, directing, and producing it! This is going to be awesome, because The Patriot kicked so much ass too, and people everywhere loved Godzilla with Matthew Broderick!"
What I would like to do to Hollywood after watching this film...
Here's the kicker: this film made a lot of money. Over at Box Office Mojo I see that Emmerich spent 200 million to make the film, and the studio grossed roughly 769 million from sales worldwide. So as rancid and horrible as this dog of a film was, until we stop watching these films when they hit the theaters my guess is that we're going to be served up with more of the same. I'm guessing that blowing up the White House (again) and the Vatican using CGI graphics is probably cheaper than blowing up models the way he did in Independence Day, so maybe dollars per effect is more efficient now than ever before.
What isn't efficient is screen time for actors. Amanda Peet and Cusack, Oliver Platt and a host of other high-pay actors spend the entire film delivering stilted lines and screaming a lot. The screaming is only slightly more convincing than the dialog. By the end of the film, we've come to realize that Cusack is a failed author, but we still haven't heard much about the book he wrote that nobody read; well, nobody except all the important people who are sailing on this arc.
The film deviates not a whit from formula. Cusack even hooks back up with his estranged wife in almost exactly the same way Jeff Goldblum (also playing a bumbling failure role) does in Independence Day. Every explosion requires another lucky escape. Nobody in the film can turn a corner without some new potential disaster unfurls. Don't worry though, they escape or stop the bomb when the clock winds down to one second remaining. You saw this film twenty years ago, it was just different stuff that blew up.
Add Emmerich to the list of producers/writers/directors to avoid. His works continue to disappoint those of us who wish to see a real story.
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