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2012 is like watching a Special Olympics weightlifting event. The young man grunting and flexing under the lights is showing off. His feats of strength are impressive. There is awe in the eyes of those who witness his skills, his talents. But in the end, regardless of how cut he is, how much he can bench and how awesome it is to see him do it, you're just watching a powerfully strong person with below average intelligence pick up heavy things and drop them. And that's all you're doing.
That's not to say there can't be any enjoyment in that, and not just of the mean-spirited variety, either. Word is that this movie cost about 250-million dollars. There are maybe two or three moments total where it doesn't look like it. And if you're coming solely to watch a moron hoist the left coast and smash it down into the ocean, you're going to leave pleased. But there is a story here, and it takes up a significant amount of the nearly three-hour runtime and, unfortunately, that same moron is in charge of that, too. To wit:
John Cusack is Jackson Curtis, a barely-published author estranged from his wife (Amanda Peet) who lives with his children (both annoying moppets) and their prospective stepdad (Tom McCarty). Cusack is taking his annoying kids on a lame camping trip, where they happen upon the Army monitoring the crust of the Earth thanks to Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) an earnest, naive scientist who has discovered that the sun is jizzing neutrinos into the core of the Eart. This of course, will cause the core to overheat, giving the Earth really bad skin, like geological psoriasis crossed with volcanic pizzaface. Just like the Mayans always said it would happen.
After the Army releases him and his kids, Cusack bumps into Woody Harrelson, looking like a homeless wood nymph and living in an RV, subsisting off Pabst and pickles. That sentence, by the way, accurately describes probably the most three-dimensional character in the entire movie. Anyway, Harrelson has been keeping tabs on the government's secret plan to build humanity saving superboats called "Arks," because the government has really shitty writers and planners. Cusack sponges a couple PBR's off Harrelson, writes him off as a crazy wood nymph with shitty taste in beer and drives his kids home just in time for LA to fall into the ocean as Bill Hicks smiles and lights another Marlboro 100 in Hell.
From this point forward, Cusack outraces an earthquake, drives through a collapsing building, jumps a limo AND an RV over giant cracks on the ground, outruns the ash cloud from the eruption of Yellowstone National Park on foot, drives a Bentley out of a crashing airliner onto a glacier and manages to hold his breath for roughly eight minutes underwater. Because he's been cast to be "cool" and appeal to "the kids," he does it all with the same bored, lazy, uninspired look on his face, even when he's screaming for his life.
The characters aren't even characters, they're single personality traits dressed up in human suits. When it's most convenient, they transform into convenient stepping stones for the plot. Like when Peet's plastic surgeon boyfriend happens to know how to fly a plane. Or when Cusack, mankind's least published author, also happens to also be the human being best equipped to navigate raining automobiles, failing skyscrapers and, most impressively, Los Angeles traffic in a fucking limo. Everyone else in the movie can be summed up entirely by two-word descriptions. Danny Glover is: BLACK PRESIDENT. George Segal is: OLD DAD. Oliver Platt is: ASSHOLE BUREAUCRAT. Beatrice Rosen is: HOT WHORE. One of Cusack's kids still wets herself at age seven, an endearing character quirk until we realize that it's her defining characteristic. In fact, as the camera pulls back through the clouds to bring us the end credits, we get: "No more pull-ups!" she proudly tells a smiling Cusack. I forgot this was a plot point until she capped off the survival of humanity by reminding us of mankind's real victory: bladder control. And you're going to need a mastery of that skill if you hope to make it through all two-hours and 40-minutes of 2012
Emmerich doesn't try to avoid the classic disaster movie cliches. Nor does he try to put a creative spin on them. He simply grabs every single one of those cliches, and I mean every single disaster movie cliche you've ever seen, from Irwin Allen to his own Independence Day, and he wallows in them shamelessly. I don't mean that in the haughty literary way. I mean to use the word in the way mangy dogs understand it as they flop on their back--feet in the air, tongues lolling--and wallow in the freshly flattened carcass of some large rodent that found itself under a semi's wheels. That is how Emmerich wallows in 2012, twisting his hips, eyes glassy and wild, red rocket gleaming in the beautiful, pointlessly destructive asshole we know as the sun. For more from Fatboy, check out his review of The Invention of Lying and The 5 Most Unintentionally Racist Movies About Racism. |
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The Bill Hicks reference has popped up in a few places it seems.
That authentic Mayan pizza face disc is staring you doubting d*****ts right in the face. 2012 is REAL, man! Congratulations, you've won! Just leave three obvious bank identifiers after you click here.
OMG I so totally agree with the review here... I was kinda bugged by the bald geologists and clean shaven researchers on the tv talking about end of world facts. but after seeing this, it seems i can enjoy life for what it always has been, like getting screwed by politicians and squeezed by the tax department etc. etc. etc.
I saw that last night. The plot did fit the long 2 and 1/2 hours but it was extremely predictable. I pretty much knew half of the stuff in that movie was going to happen. I feel like some of that movie was trying to send some sort of message for society, but I'm not going to ruin anything or make examples here...
Bill Hicks reference, you guys. We need more.
waaaaaaaaahhhhh, the picture isn't really bill hicks, waaaaaaaahhhhh. shut up, bill hicks is awesome and all but who f**king cares.
I saw this movie last night. If I were to ever see it again on disc I would watch the Los Angeles and maybe the Yellowstone disaster scenes, and that's it. The Himalayan sequence at the end was really anti-climatic. As for the characters, every time they had emotional communications it was like watching Anakin and Padme in the Star Wars prequels - you just wanted it to f**king end. There also were a few instances of "Oh my god we're going to die!" moments from characters who HAD ALREADY IMPROBABLY SURVIVED PRIOR DISASTERS IN THE FILM. But what really pissed me off were the "personality switches" within the movie. For instance, Oliver Platt was not an "a*****e bureaucrat" through most of the movie, but at the end to create conflict they just said "f**k it" and changed him into one. And the Russian billionaire was even worse - first he lets John Cusack and his family on the plane, then he turns around and totally screws them over when they board the helicopters in China, and then he again turns around and heroically saves his kids and sacrifices his own life in the process. Horses**t. Incredibly poorly-written movie.
How can you reference Bill Hicks and then just slap in a picture of a random guy smoking. Google Bill Hicks and you will literally be drowning in pictured of him smoking a cigarette. Rather than be lazy, just don't put in a picture. As for the rest. Eh. We all knew what this movie would be. Eye candy for mouth breathers with average to astonishingly low IQs. Kind of like complaining about Michael Bay explosions. Or pointing out that water is wet.
That little plane should've been MELTED for spending a couple of seconds enveloped in the Pyroclastic cloud of the erupting Yellowstone crater. Even the French airport control tower got obliterated the moment it got hit by the super-hot cloud (The Antonov take-off scene)
Don't forget the "Wow, that sounds like Science!" factor. "See, the nulecules are interacting with the xrays, calculus, square root, x, delta, beta, alpha, black hole, core." And now, we return you to some 'splosions.
Thanks for all the spoilers without warning. Dick. Just because you don't like a movie doesn't mean you have to ruin it for everyone else. Let them figure out the ending in the first ten minutes on their own.
mhmm i'm very glad i did not watch this movie now. but honestly one watch of the preview buried that movie deep.
I LOVED this review. Thank you so much for making me cry/laugh hysterically for the last ten minutes. You wrote everything I was thinking when I watched this movie.
I LOVED this review. Thank you so much for making me cry/laugh hysterically for the last ten minutes. You wrote everything I was thinking when I watched this movie.
"[...]I mean to use the word in the way mangy dogs un
Tell your Photoshop research guy that when the article says "and Bill Hicks lights a cigarette in Hell", and you have a picture of a guy lighting a cigarette, IT IS NOT OKAY IF THAT GUY IS NOT BILL HICKS. The reason the article mentioned that Bill Hicks would probably light a cigarette is because HE IS SMOKING IN BASICALLY EVERY PICTURE THERE IS OF HIM. It would not be hard to find a picture of him smoking, and Photoshop it onto a hellish background (which is quite obviously what you did with the guy in the current picture. However, I can't really complain about the article at all.
And in kylanbeard we have yet another idiot who read a wikipedia article and is now expert on mayan bulls**t.
You spent the entire first paragraph on a ridiculously strained analogy comparing something to the Special Olympics? A whole f**king paragraph. Seriously? I hate you, Fatboy.
For once, I actually understood the entirety of a Fatboy-article. I am proud.
The Maya never once claimed the world would end in 2012. It doesn't surprise me that yet another idiot goes on and on about a topic he knows nothing about. If you need proof of this face, then here it is. This is a short video of Don Alejandro, the Grand Elder of the Maya, and the head of the National Mayan Council of Elders of Guatemala. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcaez8jn2Zg
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