Review: 2012 (2009)

 

Let’s turn back a decade to 2012, the year that gave us Gangnam Style, a US Presidential election that actually went entirely as predicted, and that one time people thought the world was going to end because they forgot how a calendar works. A mere three years before that, cinematic master of disaster Roland Emmerich saw fit to throw in his daring speculation of a rather close future with this epic that sought to be the grandest and most nonsensical apex of his career. And in at least one respect, he succeeded! 

Yep, between Stargate, Area 51 in Independence Day, and the rather insulting Shakespearean ‘alternate theories’ put forward in Anonymous, Herr Emmerich—who can, if nothing else, at least say he’s not Uwe Boll as far as German directors go—does enjoy him some concepts that are…out there. For decades, 2012 was marked as a special date, as you may remember, on account of it being the end of the Mayan calendar. Now, as the Mayans themselves—who never actually went anywhere—pointed out, a calendar tends to just start over when it ends. But silly things like facts are of course never an impediment to the very, very fervid imaginations of many people, as we’ll find out!

2012 has the same essential gist as many of Emmerich’s prior films—we have a slightly ostracized nerd, or in this case multiple nerds, who stumble on a portentous truth, and end up caught rather improbably in literally earth-shattering events while the US government fumbles around. Here, we have Chiwetel Ejiofor, who does give his best the way he always does, finding out that ‘neutrinos are mutating’, and this is causing the Earth’s core to heat up, leading eventually to something that can be eloquently described as a ‘clusterfuck beyond compare’. 

Now, you don’t need a PHD in particle physics to garner that mutating neutrinos makes as much sense as water getting sad. Perhaps it would’ve been more hilarious and honest if they simply turned dramatically to the camera to announce that the Earth’s core is heating…for no apparent reason! 

Anyhoo, most of the rest is about another ostracized nerd, with John Cusack playing a well-meaning schmuck whose name I can’t remember, stumbling backwards and forwards across disintegrating continents with his family and friends in an effort to find safety. It’s been said that this is an entire film about them being so lucky to not be standing in the spot they were five seconds before…and that’s not wrong. In this universe, not only can particles spontaneously decide they want to be something else, but everywhere on the globe is situated above a giant chasm just waiting to swallow you up unless you keep running.

All of Los Angeles just sinking. Now if that isn't an apt metaphor for something or another, I don't know what is.

Well, alright—all things considered, the gratuitous destruction delivers exactly what the movie promised, and at least Emmerich gives you a very good look at it, as opposed to someone like Michael Bay who’d endeavour to give you a seizure with jump cuts instead. There is one scene where the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, and that being something actually not outside the realms of possibility for once here, it’s actually one impressive and slightly terrifying shot—if anything, the movie probably downplays how powerful it’d be.

Safety tip--if witnessing a pyroclastic detonation that puts nuclear warheads to shame, make sure to give it a good, long stare. Eye contact makes it go away, see. 

Another staple of Emmerich’s is half a dozen subplots of characters of varying interest, with the most memorable being that of Chiwetel’s scientist guy clashing with a US government official played by Oliver Platt—who is of course made out as an an antagonist, but really just comes off as more of a blunt-talking pragmatist. And, ironically, at the climax when the heroes start making flowery speeches about saving everyone they can, Platt’s guy ends up looking better when the whole shebang nearly dies as a result. Ambiguous writing, or merely confused?

That’s why this film encapsulates and epitomizes both all the things Emmerich does right and wrong, and by extension many a big disaster extravaganza as this. There’s no denying that he sells a sense of scale—there’s tsunamis big enough to cover the entire Indian subcontinent and then the Himalayas, and well, the film does not shy from demonstrating how big they are exactly. At the same time, however, there’s a reason why many consider Independence Day to be the last all-rounded film he did—the script wasn’t really any better than it is here, but it did have actors with the actual charisma and charm to sell it in the form of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum. Subtract that one critical ingredient, and we get just plain nonsense like Day After Tomorrow. 

I guess if Emmerich wanted to put a cap on the disaster genre with this one, he perhaps succeeded—after this, we had the film Geostorm, with failed even on the spectacle side with CG that looked already a decade out of date on release. Emmerich eventually returned with Moonfall…which took the stupidity of 2012, and strove to show that yes, you can in fact make a film even stupider! And isn’t that an achievement in itself! 

Thank god that after all the real-life stupidity of people running around like headless chickens in the actual December of 2012, we never had folks act as silly as that again…right?