Re: 2012 (John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Woody Harrelson) Grading & Discuss
2012
Rated PG-13 for intense depictions of global disaster and some language.
My Grade: A generous C+
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Quick! Name the top 4 vehicles you'd last pick to be in to survive the Apocalypse! I'll wait.
...
...
Done? If you picked:
1. A limousine
2. A 20-year-old RV
3. A Piper twin-engined airplane.
And 4. A Russian vintage jumbo cargo jet.
You are officially smarter than the characters in this movie. Congrats... for all that that is worth.
2012 is absurd. Absurd on so many levels it's hardly funny, well it actually is funny. Where I said this past summer's "Transformers 2" raped every sense in your body, this movie does the same to your common senses, it's surprisingly gentle to your other senses.
2012, as you well know and expect, takes place during the end of the Mayan Calendar, instead of planning to blow horns and sing "Auld Lang Syne" people expected the Earth to say "fuck you, life!" and just go bat-shit crazy. Although this movie dispenses with things expected to happen in 2012 and just sort of makes up its own thing. For this movie, a series of super-solar storms on The Sun are going to bombard our planet with "a new kind of energy" that will super-heat the core and mantle allowing the crust to free-flow on top of it and cause all kinds of nonsense. ("But, Trekker," you say, "if this solar radiation is super-heating the mantle wouldn't it also do the same to the crust and everything on it?" Yes, yes it would. But never-mind logic!)
So this movie sets up various series of characters we're supposed to invest our emotions into. First we have John Cusak, a struggling novelist divorcee who's taking his children to a camping trip in Yellowstone, his trip is cut short when his ex-wife calls him and the kids home early. He's lucky too because she called him back home early from vacation in time for him to be called by his boss to be reamed out for being late. (!) The ex-wife is played by Amanda Peet who fills our comely ex-wife quotient for a Roland Emmerich movie. Later on in the movie, with his wife and kids in tow, Cusak's character will out run the collapse of the entire Pacific Coast in a limousines, including driving through collapsing buildings and dodging crumbling freeways. He'll later out-run the eruption of the Yellowstone super-volcano in an RV he borrowed from and underused Woody Harrleson (playing a conspiracy nut with a radio-station in said RV.) Along for the ride also is Peet's boyfriend who's a pilot with two lessons, he manages to fly said twin-engine aircraft and Russian jumbo-jet through collapsing continents and parks despite likely never having set foot in a plane yet.
This group, along with a Russian billionaire, his bratty kids and his mistress fill our "average joes" quotient of the characters.
On the other-side of the spectrum we have the "experts and government characters." Our expert is a geologist who predicts all of this going to happen, poorly, and is a constant head to head struggle with one of the President's chief advisers (played by Oliver Platt.) The expert is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor who's pretty much a poor man's Denzel Washington while also getting a lot more bang for your buck.
Seriously, the guy is awesome and probably the best actor and thing about this movie. Ejiofor has advised the President -and other world leaders- to build a handful of arks in the Himalayas designed to protect a few thousand people from the cataclysms in an effort to preserve our species, our "everyday heroes" struggle to make it to these arks, despite the slim likelihood they'll get on them.
Emmerich pulls out pretty much every action-movie cliche there is in this movie, there's the woman who desperately wants to save her dog, people trapped behind water-tight bulkheads, people running from fireballs, you name this movie has it. Tell me, how often have you seen the smart, caring, scientist guy get in a shouting match with the cold-hearted stuffy government guy?
As Emmerich fare goes this movie delivers, the man knows how to create an SFX spectacle and even play on character cliches but he fumbles when he tries to do anything with characters. He tries to put too much drama into these characters and movie and it doesn't work. Not that the actors can't handle drama it's just that Emmerich can't write, or direct it. As I said Ejofor does pretty good in the movie despite the terrible material.
Another decent performance in the movie is Danny Glover playing POTUS, but there's the missed opportunity of him grumbling, "I'm too old for this shit!" at some point after dealing with an aspect of the crisis.
This movie is pretty fair. It's probably worth seeing for the Special Effects, which are very well done, on the big screen but the movie does feel it's running time (2.5 hours) and the character/drama scenes are... a lot to take. You'll also likely roll your eyes so much you'll get a detached retina from all of the nonsense these characters do and go through. For example, you're trapped in an ship's dry-ballast tank. You've got to get to a wenching mechanism that's powerful enough to lift a door the size of 20-story building but not powerful enough to crush a small power-tool and rip it's cord. The ship you're on is moments away from crashing into Mt. Everest which it won't survive, unless the gear is cleared and the door closes. (Because the ships engines can't work with the door cracked... for some reason.) Do you a)get to the problem and correct it as soon as you can? Or do you b)stop to have a tender moment with your estranged son an ex-wife first?
This movie is absurd, but kind-of a fun absurd in a Emmerich sort-of way.
Again, it's long but probably worth seeing for the special effects on the big screen but if you miss it, you're not out much. It's a good time-waster which is about all I wanted, so in that way it succeeds as a movie.
It fails in every other way, however.
- worthy!
