2012

The movie 2012 is a movie about how the Mayans somehow ridged up the sun to melt the inside of the earth should the planets ever aline in the year 2012 because they are stupid jerks. Why would they do that? We never find out. There aren't even any dumb Mayans in the movie because they are all gone, but we do find out that John Cusack is probably the luckiest mother fucker in a movie ever. The twist? Because he is MAYAN!!!

So Roland Emmerich once made a movie called Stargate, which is a pretty cool movie. It has Kurt Russell in it. And it's an action sci-fi movie that skips over having starships and other played out sci-fi shit and goes strait for the gun battle scenes instead. Then he made Independence Day, which every single human being on the entire planet born after the year 1974 has seen. Then he made The Day after Tomorrow, the movie George W. didn't want you to see, being the reason I tried to vote for him in 2008 but wasn't allowed to. And finally he made 2012. His magnum opus. A blockbuster beyond blockbusters. Where calling it stupid entertainment just makes you the stupid one, because can you actually hear yourself? "A movie where the entire planet just starts exploding and breaking apart and flooding is unrealistic? What an insightful observation."

Seriously though, this is the dumbest, most great, fun to watch unless you think about any of it for a second, type movie there is about the year 2012. And since I'm writing this in the year 2012, I'm guessing there aren't going to be a whole lot of other movies about 2012 in the years to come. Because apparently the world ends in 2012. I better write this quick.

The far less exciting prequel "2011" was just about the British Royal wedding and Occupy Wall Street

Despite how terrible Roland Emmerich's movies are, beside Stargate, I have a soft spot for the guy. ID4 was pretty cool when it came out too, but I'm not really talking about his movies. They are as cheesy and dumb as any other blockbuster to come out. In fact they're where the bar is set for cheesy and dumb. But I've always felt a kind of kinship with Roly. Because the two of us seem to be the only ones that actually like disaster movies. Although this argument is void because there have been a million disaster movies coming out recently, I don't care, once upon a time there were only a few, and they were far between, and they were almost always terrible. The Disaster Genre has the potential to be one of the most interesting. You deal with characters in survival situations when the stakes are high and they have no one but each other to get them out of danger. You have explosions, or falling buildings, or an avalanche, or genetically engineered genius sharks. You have exhilarating stories where anything can happen at any time. But they always turn out crappy because they are about genetically engineered genius sharks.  But you have to give it to Roland, because he says fuck it and makes them anyways. And he doesn't fuck around either.

You know how movies will sometimes shaft believability by having the bomb be deactivated with 1 second left on the bomb clock thing? Not 5 seconds, or 20, which is still pretty close, but just 1 second, where you literally couldn't have came any closer to blowing up. Or when someone runs out of a burning building RIGHT as it collapses? This movies is 2 and a half hours of that. There is a scene where John Cusack and his family jump in a plane and are taking off the runway right as everything else around them is exploding and breaking apart in a giant earthquake. Up until now they were driving in a limo through buildings and jumps huge caverns, and now the entire state of California is turning upside down, with the only solid ground being the runway in front of them. Everything to the side: Gone. Everything behind them: Exploding and earth quaking away, all of it moving closer to them as they try to get their plane off the ground. As they move forward, the ground once beneath them gives away immediately, and they take off just as the rest of it goes, flying off as they try to dodge crumbling buildings and a subway train seriously goes gliding over them. Roland goes balls out with this scene, and then he turns around and does the same exact thing, plane taking off and all, 2 MORE TIMES. He puts the same exact scene in the movie, but done bigger, once with them just taking off as the Yellowstone super volcano goes off, and again with a giant plane as Las Vegas folds in on itself, TWO MORE TIMES!! That takes guts. There's no way you couldn't notice you'd already done the "plane just barely takes off in time and doesn't have the altitude to make it so they pull up and just scrap a nearby building/Rock on fire/Eiffel tower" scene. His writers must have said "We already did that" and he still said "Do it again. Twice!"

 The deaths of millions of innocent people just trying to mayan'd their own business

 

Because he knows that's what you want. He knows you don't want to learn more about the characters. I do, but you don't, and he knows that and the movie becomes scene after scene of Washington collapsing, aircraft carriers hitting the president, India flooding, Volcanoes fucking up Hawaii, a cruise ship being overturn by a million foot high waves. There's a scene where we see people in the Sistine Chapel as Michelangelo's painting of Adam putting his finger out to god has a crack come in and pass right between them. I actually yelled at the movie for that one. Scene after scene. Disaster after disaster. We see thousands of people falling to their death or being crushed just as the camera pulls out enough for it to not be too gruesome, and instead is kind of funny. We see these two old women driving around like old women right before they crash into something with a goofy sound effect. We see it more and more until it becomes all we want to see. People falling to their death, getting crushed by giant boat gears, drowning. Over and over. Roland Emmerich has completely said fuck you to all the subtly most movies try to bring and just goes for it. I'm not joking, its kind of admirable. He's cut out the bullshit and made a movie that consists entirely of disaster porn.

"DON'T DO IT, MOVIE!"

And the last act is the best part. We find out the government has been making these huge super boats, which they call arks, and even hammer it home by showing them flying in animals, although they apparently only had Elephants and Giraffes, because its the only animals they showed, and they showed the giraffes a million times, which is almost ironic since we find out at the end that Africa was fine. So they only saved two species of animals, which have no use to humans at all, that aren't even in danger since they are from Africa while all the bears and sea otters have drowned. No more cows either. No more hamburgers. They have these awesome Sci-fi boats that they take white water rafting down the Himalayas, and this weird sci-fi twist comes almost out of nowhere. Granted they also start having dumb ethical discussions about leaving some people to die dispute the fact that the other 6.99 billion people who were alive 3 hours ago have all died no thanks to them deciding to not tell anyone about the world ending, so now they get all righteous about not wanting to let a few hundred other people, who were all just rich assholes that had their boat break down anyways, die. The boats are awesome though. It drives home the whole "yes the world did end and now we move forward at restarting a brave new society" feeling that gives the story some weight. It's not a great story but at least you feel like everything you watched has some historic importance within the world created, and can't help but wonder where the story might go next. It's the most interesting part of the movie. It's not saying a lot, but I just liked the turn it takes at the end. Feels like the beginning of a better story. Like pretty much Battlestar Galactica.

It's also funny how this movie king of spits in the face of the Day After Tomorrow, despite it clearly being influenced by Roland wanted to outdo himself. Whereas the Day After Tomorrow was all about global warming and how we should take care of our planet, this one is all about earth being a giant asshole. I guess he couldn't help wanting to upgrade a movie where everyone is killed by winter to having everyone killed by everything.

Despite some of the pandering at the end, the movie never tries to be anything other then eye candy. It's people falling to their death and being crushed eye candy, but there is no promise beyond that. I like disaster movies, and although I'm still waiting for an actual good one, I usually take what i can get. So yeah, on one hand you could look at it as one of the stupidest movies ever made, but on the other, it's the finest cinematic example of Mayan political propaganda about wiping out the otter scourge once and for all. I'm not even going to try to put a rating on that.

2012 out of 10