2012, The Movie
May. 25th, 2015 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI watched 2012.
I'm not sure why I did, other than it was a freebie from Half-Price Books when I took some books in for a return, but I did. It's a ridiculous film. Since the film is seven years old, I won't bother with a spoilers warning; instead, let's just say that it runs down to two subplots: one in which the wealthy nations of the world prepare three arks, each capable of holding a few dozen thousands of their nations "most valuable" citizens, the other in which John Cusack tries to rescue his family from the oncoming disaster.
The film is full of ridiculous CGI-style physics, and as disaster films go you can see that even in 2009 they didn't have all the visual bugs quite worked out. In the end, the "good guy" of the ark initiative wins a moral battle with the "bad guy", and saves all the strangers desperately trying to get onto the ark, and by doing so just happens to get the right people into the right places to fix a poorly-described problem with the ark.
What makes it a genuinely terrible film is this: Roland Emmerich seems to take an unhealthy delight in murdering ordinary citizens. The end of the film, where the crew of the ark makes the potential sacrifice of their life support in order to take on a paltry few thousand extra souls, doesn't balance out the utter delight the camera takes in pounding, burning, dropping, smashing, crushing, and drowning ordinary people by the hundreds. There is no hope in 2012, no real chance for survival; whatever's left over of the Earth after the great disaster hits is lifeless; every field on the planet salinated in the great tidal wave that roared across the whole planet in the final cataclysmic spasm that "resets" the continents.
Awful film. Do not watch.
★★☆☆☆
I'm not sure why I did, other than it was a freebie from Half-Price Books when I took some books in for a return, but I did. It's a ridiculous film. Since the film is seven years old, I won't bother with a spoilers warning; instead, let's just say that it runs down to two subplots: one in which the wealthy nations of the world prepare three arks, each capable of holding a few dozen thousands of their nations "most valuable" citizens, the other in which John Cusack tries to rescue his family from the oncoming disaster.
The film is full of ridiculous CGI-style physics, and as disaster films go you can see that even in 2009 they didn't have all the visual bugs quite worked out. In the end, the "good guy" of the ark initiative wins a moral battle with the "bad guy", and saves all the strangers desperately trying to get onto the ark, and by doing so just happens to get the right people into the right places to fix a poorly-described problem with the ark.
What makes it a genuinely terrible film is this: Roland Emmerich seems to take an unhealthy delight in murdering ordinary citizens. The end of the film, where the crew of the ark makes the potential sacrifice of their life support in order to take on a paltry few thousand extra souls, doesn't balance out the utter delight the camera takes in pounding, burning, dropping, smashing, crushing, and drowning ordinary people by the hundreds. There is no hope in 2012, no real chance for survival; whatever's left over of the Earth after the great disaster hits is lifeless; every field on the planet salinated in the great tidal wave that roared across the whole planet in the final cataclysmic spasm that "resets" the continents.
Awful film. Do not watch.
★★☆☆☆
