2012: A Modern-Day Noah’s Ark Hits the Iceberg
BY D. JASON NAM
This is it. This is the epic film where Ronald Emmerich ran out of disaster ideas and thus decided to completely sabotage the world i n 2012. First he had aliens blow up the White House, then he had Godzilla crumble over New York City, and then he flooded and froze half of the world. He desperately tried to layoff his disaster-craze a bit with 10,000 B.C. – a prehistoric love story, which unfortunately ended up being 10,000 times boring.
Quickly learning from his disastrous mistake, Emmerich went back to what he does best: obliterating the world. Loosely basing off of the Mayan’s apocalypse prediction on 12/21/2012, Emmerich took this one small fact, added a whole bunch of the ingredient known as bullshit, and voilà! He cooked up a blockbuster film.
2012 begins the story from 2009, when all the planets in our solar system line up and the sun suddenly goes nuts. Due to the unprecedented amount of neutrinos from a massive solar flare, the Earth’s inner core quickly heats up to the point where the Earth’s crust is shifting. You would figure everyone in the world would know that their world is approaching apocalypse, but no – there is a catch – the government has been keeping this crucial information to themselves. In fact, a very few elite groups of people including the United States president knew about this upcoming phenomenon way earlier and goes around killing those that try to warn the people (so that’s why Billy Mays died!).
Then we meet our “hero” of the movie – Jackson Curtis (John Cusack). Not only is he a struggling writer that drives a limo for a Russian macho as a part-time job, but he also happens to be a struggling father and husband. He is divorced from a hot ex-wife (Amanda Peet) with two kids who don’t quite appreciate him as a family member. In his attempt to earn his love back from his family, he takes the kids out for a camping trip to the Yellow Stone National Park; only to find out that his favorite lake has completely vanished! That’s when the story finally begins to gradually roll. Jackson meets a totally gone nuts dude who eventually becomes his hook-up to all the government’s secrets about the Doomsday, and Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an American geologist hero, without whom the government would have no clue of the Doomsday. The End. Well, not really, but it’s pretty much the end in terms of the plot. From here on, it’s a whole bunch of earthquakes, explosions, more earthquakes, tsunamis, even more explosions, and – you get the point.
Staying loyal to his previous disaster flicks, Emmerich includes a few “emotional” scenes in his attempt to add some soul into the movie. The only problem is that these so-called emotional scenes end up conjuring laughter from the audience because it is so un-strategically placed. But after all, we can’t hate on the movie too much because it never told us to expect some major drama. So in terms of the question: does the movie deliver what it promised? The answer is yes, it did. Just as advertised, Emmerich successfully wiped out 90 percent of the entire world using state-of-art visual effects.
But still – I was hoping Emmerich would’ve learned from his past super-budgeted flops that big booms are simply not enough to make a movie great. And I was really hoping he would especially take a second look at the script, because by this time, we already know that his special effects are going to be excellent. Thus, this movie does not feel new. We have seen big explosions from Independence Day. We have seen big tsunami waves from The Day After Tomorrow. Emmerich basically gives us a brand new Ferrari with used engines and a little note that reads, “Fuck you” on the trunk.
So let’s try to wrap this up. Is 2012 a good Ronald Emmerich film? Yes. Is 2012 a good
Ronald Emmerich film? Hell no. The special effects were pleasing to the eyes but just like this summer’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the “Ooh, ahh” effect dies off as it approaches the second half (like that feeling you get after overstuffing yourself at the Chinese buffet). Along with Emmerich’s last three flicks, 2012 will just go down the drain hole and only be remembered as an easy to like but easier to hate epic.
