Movie Review: 2012

mayaWe just watched 2012 by Roland Emmerich. This movie was truly inspiring. Wanna know more? Read on. And if you work in Hollywood: Read the end of this post – 2012 provided me with an idea that will help Hollywood a lot more money than it already does and it even might help to create a brighter future for mankind.

First of all: I usually enjoy Roland Emmerich movies because they are full of special effects and allow me to spend an hour or three without needing to think… nay… because they usually force me not to think. I like science fiction and fantasy movies and I love special effects. I’m not a stickler for details and I can live with a certain level of suspension of disbelief. And tonight I felt like spending a couple of hours with some nice special effects. So I was well prepared… or so I thought.

So, now about the movie…

First of all the story (no spoilers here… at least no non trivial spoilers): The world ends on december, 21st, 2012, like the Mayas (and some other folks) predicted… kind of. In Roland Emmerichs latest creation neutrinos from sun eruptions mutate (they call it so – I didn’t make that up) and heat Earth’s core until the outer mantle starts to desolidify and everything goes to hell. Billions die, most of the main characters survive and in the end everyone sails into a beautiful sunset (no, I didn’t make that up either).

Thanks Hollywood. This movie has excellent special effects raising the level of disaster movies once more. And it has the most braindead story I have seen for a long time. Heck, even Transformers II was kind of credible compared to this huge heap of bullshit. Plan 9 from Outer Space seems credible and scientifically researched compared to this.

Let’s not talk about the Yellowstone eruption blast being barely strong enough to ruffle the hair of our heroes, let’s not talk about there being no wind at all so that a small aircraft just flies away quite safely, let’s not talk about the ensuing nuclear winter barely lasting long enough for the final sunset, let’s not talk about the absolutely incredible scene when our heroes run out of fuel on their flight from Las Vegas to China (don’t ask), start to go down with their plane and… suddenly discover that the continental shifts resulting from Armageddon by pure luck moved all the continents in exactly such a way that our heroes can land only a few miles away from mankind’s only safe harbor (the heroes even comment their incredible luck… I almost fell out of my chair laughing). There are so many incredible moments in this movie… the main characters being cheered at after accidently causing the death of dozens or possible hundreds of people because they breached hull security the safety arcs to save their lives… cities always getting blown up just seconds after the main characters manage to find yet another plane or car to escape… old shoddy busses driving faster than the magma and heat waves of erupting super volcanoes (the folks at Mount St. Helens probably could have used such busses), ships being thrown against Mount Everest and no passenger being hurt, tsunamis of about 7 kilometers in height, Africa rising something like 9 kilometers and retaining its basic shape, elephants dangling from helicopters in the middle of the Himalaya, earthquakes strong enough to completely annihilate LA and yet not strong enough to stop a limousine on its route through a quickly collapsing city, happy people after about 6.4 billion others died, pathos so dripping and mindless its very hard to bear… probably even for US citizens although they seem to be more resistant to pathos overdoses than other parts of the world… I could go on and on and on.

The story really is incredibly abysmal…

Now for the actors. I really like John Cusack. But this time he didn’t have a chance. His character remains flat and uninteresting and the most sympathetic and believable person in the movie to me was the rather evil russian billionaire. All the rest is forgettable. Even the fictional versions of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel (although they are named differently… I wonder what happened between 2009 and 2012 in that parallel Earth).

So: Watch the movie if you just want some special effects. Do not think about the story. Or rather: Try… hard… not… to… think… about… the… story. It is going to kill. In a best case scenario. It also might turn you into a slobbering zombie.

Now my advice for Hollywood: Save yourself the money for script writers. If you pay any for such movies. Save yourself the money for real actors. There do not seem to be enough memorable characters in these movies to justify the expenses. And do yourself save the money for expensive directors. Just pay for the SFX department and a rudimentary storyboard. Give us a maximum of 60 minutes of SFX where Earth gets (almost) destroyed, cities explode or sink beneath the ocean, etc. pp. This will save you a lot of time and money… and it well help us to save a lot of time, too. And then rejoice: Just count how much time mankind will save if such disasters like 2012 run less than an hour compared to its glorious 158 minutes… the total time saved is probably enough to invent some great new things that will be beneficial for everyone.

Oh dear… what a movie. Glorious SFX… bastard of everything else. I’m exhausted now.

2 Responses to “Movie Review: 2012”

  1. Christian Pöcher  on November 25th, 2009

    The movie HAS to be bad to be able to end the world by 2012. 😉

  2. Gregor Wenzel  on December 18th, 2009

    I could not agree more – this movie was extremely crappy.
    Although I confess that it was extraordinarily amusing – I love to see common sense and logic fail dramatically in movies and have a jolly good laugh.

    The most horribe glimpse into a warped reality was the scene with the animals being transported over the Himalayas. Though, having actually taken part in the movie itself, those animals were probably already zombified by its brainlessness (+4). So no problems there, right.

    There MUST be some good sci-fi or fantasy movies out there WITH a good plot and belieavable characters (Avatar, perhaps [pretty please])!