I saw "2012" yesterday, on a whim. It was an odd juxtaposition with "The Road" of the day before, since both serve up apocalypse -- one monochromatic, bleak, and cold; the latter, exuberant and hopeful.
Having no expectations of cinematic excellence with "2012," I wasn't disappointed. I knew critics had panned it, but it hardly matters with a disaster movie like that -- what moral message are you going to get from a movie like that, anyway? It's good to be alive? Family's important? Know the right people? Everybody matters? (easy to say when you're one of the survivors)
It was hokey, had a lot of famous people cameos that felt a bit like "Naked Gun" (oooh, that's supposed to be the Governator! Ooh, there's Queen Elizabeth II!) and so on.
The effects are massive and astounding -- an orgy of mass destruction, annihilation on a grand scale, with little people tumbling into gaping holes in the ground, or being smashed by tsunamis (or by aircraft carriers tumbling -- the symbolism of a black President being killed by the carrier John F. Kennedy was not lost on me, whether Emmerich intended it or not, and I think it was intended, since the carrier broadsides poor, ashy Danny Glover, the name of the carrier visible across the flight deck as it nails Glover).
John Cusack and Amanda Peet don't really gel as a couple, and the kid characters are predictably annoying (the character sketches with them are laughably slight -- the boy has a cell phone! The girl loves wearing hats and apparently diapers because she wets the bed -- something that reappears near the end in an all-time terrible line of dialogue). Woody Harrelson's hippy-dippy deejay loves to eat pickles (that's his character quirk, I guess).
But the characters are entirely beside the point with a movie like this -- the only point is the massive destruction, which gets a bit repetitive as you wade through it. Three airplane near-escapes, lots of waves, tumbling mountains, human dignity (and shame) in the face of certain doom, and so on. I can imagine a grad student doing studies of disaster movies, the evolution of them, the arbiters of virtue and villainy.
A few thematic flourishes rubbed me the wrong way -- several times a kind of tooth-sucking about the futility of modern technology and civilized life in the face of ancient prophecies and crackpot "wisdom." Those little bits happened several times, which was annoying. People might think it, but nobody wants the world to end quite so badly as the crackpots, and few are more disappointed (yet undaunted) when the world fails to end on cue -- the world is bigger than the world's religions, but don't tell that to them (or to Emmerich).
Bizarrely, Africa survives the apocalypse, and appears to be the hope of the survivors, owing to some geological quirk. Not sure the point of that, exactly, except I guess come-uppance for Western Civilization and Africa's turn at bat (I imagine malaria will make very short work of most of the survivors who make landfall there, but it's beside the point of a movie like this).
Still, it does its thing -- massive destruction, the aesthetics of apocalypse, like a gaper's delay in traffic, everybody peeking at the car accident as they go by. Move along, move along -- nothing to see, here.
