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No filmmaker is willing to justify mass destruction and cinematic mayhem with flimsier excuses than Roland Emmerich. Emmerich got away with earlier in his directorial career because the films counterbalanced their stupidity with a fair measure of unbridled fun — like we have in Independence Day, Stargate, or The Patriot (by far his most grounded film). But then came his version of Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow… and this movie.
2012 is an attempt to capitalize on the long-standing Mayan prophecy that the world would end in December of the year 2012. Spoiler alert: It didn’t. Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser try to justify the film’s myriad earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis with some bullshit story about solar flares, neutrinos, and global crustal displacement. And 2012 doesn’t just force all these events to happen — it milks them for all they’re worth. Characters outrun earthquakes on foot, by car, and finally by airplane. The president doesn’t just drown on the White House lawn. First, he gets crushed by a aircraft carrier. The action is elaborate, suspenseful, and abundant. 2012 is the extreme polar opposite of boring. But it’s also one of the most ridiculous movies ever made. If you’re hungry for a disaster movie, and you don’t give a single, solitary fuck how it’s explained or how realistic the story is, then 2012 might over-deliver for you. But if you need the story and characters to be at least somewhat grounded and believable, then you’ll probably have a hard time with Emmerich’s madness.
The casting is a throwback to Irwin Allen’s all-star approach from the ’70s. I can’t fault anyone in the cast, as they all fully commit to their roles no matter how silly things get. John Cusack fronts the ensemble as a divorced dad trying to vacation with his kids at Yellowstone park when a conspiracy junkie (Woody Harrelson) clues him into a government conspiracy. When the ground begins to shake and Yellowstone erupts with lava, Cusack hightails it back to L.A. to grab his wife (Amanda Peet) and her new boyfriend (Tom McCarthy) right before California slides into the ocean. Chiwetel Ejiofor co-stars as a geologist working with the White House Chief of Staff (Oliver Platt) and the U.S. President (Danny Glover) on a secret plan to load a number of ‘arks’ with enough humans and animals to repopulate the planet some day. So the last half of the movie is about getting to those arks after the vast majority of humanity is destroyed.
I enjoyed 2012 enough to get through it, and I’ll even admit that some of the action left me breathless — but only viscerally, not emotionally, and certainly not intellectually. It’s a remarkably gargantuan production, one of the biggest and most complex I’ve probably ever seen. It’s less impactful than Emmerich’s previous films, but it’s better than some of the god-awful crap he’d give us years later (I’m referring to you, Moonfall). There’s never a dull moment, and the cast are intermittently able to shine in fleeting moments. It’s the kind of movie I would only watch on a big screen with loud surround sound, as the visceral experience is by far the best reason to watch this movie.
With Thandie Newton, George Segal, and Blu Mankuma.