2012

What one has to say right up front is that the premises this movie are based on are utter bullshit. The first premise is that because the Mayan calendar seems to end in the year 2012, that something bad is going to happen. Something like the end of the world. This is sort of like saying that, because there are no more January days beyond January 31st, that the world will end. Turn the freakin’ page, idiot! The Mayans carved their calendars in stone, so turn over the freakin’ stone! Honestly, I’ll bet even the modern-day Mayans are busting a gut laughing at this one.

I’ve lost count of the number of times the end of the world has been predicted in my 62 years on this small planet. Sometimes it’s just a handful of idiots who believe a prediction by a minor prophet, but sometimes the idiocy is contagious and spreads worldwide, like Y2K. My favorite was way back in the ‘60s, when the asteroid Icarus was making a close approach (close in astronomical terms; 4 million miles, 16 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon). Some guru or other decided the government was lying to us, and we were about to be smacked real hard. (Hey, it was the ‘60s, we were all stoned.) Me and a bunch of friends drove to the top of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County to join an end-of-the-world celebration. Everybody figured the best seats would be up high. We all had a great time, drinking, smoking, roistering around a big bonfire. When the sun came up—damn!—we went home. Let me assure you I didn’t believe a word of it even back then. I just figured it would be a good party, and it was.

But the use of the 2012 malarkey is really just a device to hang an end-of-the-world story on. Not much is made of it. Only Woody Harrelson believes it in the movie, and you know Woody. He’ll believe anything.

Second premise: In the muddled build-up to the special effects we all came to see, “scientists” fret that a shitstorm of neutrinos is disturbing the core of the Earth, or something like that. Continents are going to shift, thousands of miles. Whew! That’s some shift, by golly! Trust me, there is not a coherent, meaningful word uttered by any of these “scientists.” If anything, this explanation of what’s about to happen is loonier than the Mayan calendar proposition. In fact, there is not a single scientific “fact” in this movie that bears the slightest resemblance to the real world.

As for the rest … oh, my. Where to begin? This movie has earned several superlatives, not all of them ones to be proud of. I think it’s safe to say that it is the most spectacular motion picture thus far made since Edison began grinding them out in New Jersey with his kinetograph. It’s hard to imagine a film that would have more spectacle, unless it was just one continuous action scene. First Los Angeles is destroyed, then Yellowstone Park explodes, then Las Vegas craps out, then an aircraft carrier lands on the White House, then … well, on and on and on. A sequence like the capsizing of an ocean liner is tossed off casually, where only five years ago it would have been the centerpiece of any film that could afford to film it.

I’ve complained about roller-coaster films before, but I’m not against them, per se, and this one is a humdinger. I’ve never seen so many awesome scenes strung together in one movie, and the level of realism is incredible. Remember how awed we were at the long, moving shot of the Titanic, 12 years ago? Where you could see hundreds of people on the deck, moving around? Only … if you looked closely on a big screen, they looked like little robots. They lacked detail. Well, here we get literally thousands of CGI people being tossed around like grains of sand in the wind, and they look pretty real. If you froze a frame and looked real close, I’ll bet you could distinguish faces. Glass in skyscrapers shatters and it looks real, cars tumble out of parking garages and it looks real. Pretty much all of it looks real.

Then the action/destruction stops …

And we get into scenes so goofy, so off-the-shelf, so uninspired … well, they are just awful. It struck me how old-fashioned those parts of this movie are. Just like The Towering Inferno, just like Earthquake, when things stop shaking, nothing much is going on, and what is, is stupid. And in fact, those “character establishment” scenes even look primitive, with bad lighting and color, uninspired camera work, the production values of a Bollywood grinder, as if the director couldn’t be bothered to bring his A team to such stuff, as if it was spliced in with stock footage from another movie.

It’s a quandary. You can’t just make a movie that strings together one disaster after another (though this one comes close); you have to have people trying to survive it, and it helps if you care, at least a little, if they survive. So 2012 devotes most of the first hour to setting it all up, and it’s a snooze. John Cusack works hard, and he’s never been bad, as far as I can remember, but he’s not given much to work with. Woody Harrelson delivers another of his patented loonies; good for a few laughs. That’s about it for rooting interest. Back in the White House, things are much worse. We have the Concerned Scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the Ruthless Pragmatist (Oliver Platt), and they face off endlessly over the morality of what they’re doing to save a small core of humanity, including an interminable, totally dreadful scene near the end with the clock counting down to the final disaster, where they seem to have all the time in the world to make their respective cases to the fleeing presidents of the G8 (no third-world nations need apply for berths in the Arks). Oh, god, it goes on and on and on … I was in real danger of falling asleep as the giant tsunami scaled the peaks of the Himalayas outside.

As for the action scenes … I expected this movie to be many things—the level of action didn’t surprise me, nor did the inanity of the cause of the end of the world, nor the kindergarten level of characterization. What I hadn’t expected was that much of the movie is flat-out hilarious. Not because of witty dialogue, nor pratfalls, nor jokes. It is just that the sheer number of hair-breadth escapes is so insanely overdone, so gigantically exaggerated, so … I dunno, dumb … that I just burst out laughing. It began as the Cusack family was escaping a crumbling Los Angeles in a stretch limo. For the entire extended sequence the ground is literally crumbling away beneath their tires. The opening cracks in the Earth are actually chasing them. John whips the car this way and that, and every choice turns out to be the right one! He’s the luckiest son-of-a-bitch who ever lived, by far. And that’s just the beginning. Shortly after that they’re flying through skyscrapers (most of which I don’t recall seeing in LA), with debris missing them by inches. … only to escape to Yellowstone Park—the largest volcano in the world, by the way, and only semi-dormant; real smart place to go during a geological catastrophe, don’t you think?—where once again the ground is falling away beneath the rear wheels of an RV John is driving. And I realized, all these scenes are basically the same scene: It’s Eliza crossing the icy Ohio in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s Lillian Gish drifting down the river on a chunk of ice in Way Down East. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Only the technology is different.

Once more you gotta laugh. I’m not complaining, really I’m not; I didn’t come to this movie expecting plausibility. And boy, I sure didn’t get it. I had a good time, laughing. The only thing to do is sit back and enjoy the ride …

… until you get to the moral core of the film, which is argued mostly at the most critical points, when things are about to go to hell, bringing the action to a most unwelcome screeching halt, and you just want to scream “Talk about it later, you idiots! The tidal wave is sweeping you toward Mount freakin’ Everest!!!” See, a secret conspiracy of world leaders has decided to build these massive arks, and they plan to save about 400,000 people. Naturally, the first question is, who goes? And naturally (this part rings true), it is mostly the cowardly cocksucker world leaders themselves, and the richest scum of the Earth, and their friends and families. I have no doubt whatever that people like that would shoot a thousand infants and children if that’s what was standing between them and the ark. And of course their staterooms are spacious and well-appointed.

But they also are taking along the world’s great art works. And in the movie’s most ludicrous scene (in a movie teeming with ludicrous scenes), they are also stocking the arks, Noah-like, with all the world’s animals. I ask you, what use is a giraffe going to be in the brave new world, scoured clean of most plant life? But we see one, dangling beneath a helicopter, along with elephants. The people already on the arks spend a lot of time debating whether or not to board the angry hordes of workers who have built these arks high in the mountains, but nobody asks whether saving artwork and animals is a good thing, at the price of leaving human beings to die in the catastrophe. I will let you decide on your own whether it would be a good idea to take exotic animals on the ark (myself, I say take horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, chickens, and not much else). But I submit to you that taking art works is a crime against humanity. In the final analysis, the Mona Lisa is garbage. Gutenberg Bibles are garbage. The US Constitution and the Magna Carta are garbage. The Pieta, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the complete manuscripts of Beethoven, the Wright Brothers Flyer, the Library of Congress, the contents of all the world’s museums … all garbage. Throw it all on the bonfire to keep warm. I’m speaking of the originals, of course. The Mona Lisa, the Constitution, and all the world’s art and literature can now be put into a shoeboxful of DVDs; to bring the bulky originals is nothing less than a crime. With the end of the world coming, Van Gogh’s “Irises” is not worth $50,000,000, it is worth nothing. It’s a piece of canvas with paint daubs on it. You want to see “Irises” after the Apocalypse, bring it up on your computer screen.

Idle thought: Why is it that they can make a convincing sequence showing a tidal wave carrying an aircraft carrier smashing down on people huddled in the snow near the White House, and they can’t make the snow covering the people look real? It’s as phony as soap flakes drifting down from the fly loft in a kindergarten play, as phony as shaving cream, or a flocked Xmas tree. With CGI they have finally mastered those three unscalable bugaboos of the SFX modelmaker’s art—smoke, water, and fire—and they can’t make convincing studio snow. Weird, huh?

Oh, almost forgot … I swore I’d not get into a listing of the sheer impossibilities in this story—I’d need twenty pages—but there is one howler I just have to mention. They have two years from their first warning until the giant arks, at least ten times the size of the largest ship afloat, must be ready to launch. When we see the installation, it is so massive it could not possibly have been built in less than 30 years. It would have taken a lot more than two years just to excavate the place, much less build three ships. One person says, I didn’t think it was possible in that amount of time, but just give the job to those Chinese … Oh, really? China, where manufacturing is so corrupt they can’t even keep the poison out of the toothpaste and baby food? I wouldn’t want to break a bottle of champagne over the bows of those arks. The hull would probably shatter like a stomped-on fortune cookie. As for getting aboard, I’d rather take my chances on the top of Mount Everest.