Review: 2012

The attachment we forge to tokens of pop culture are often more about snapshots of where we're at that time in our lives than a reflection of our real pleasures or preferences. I realize this the most when I look at the career of director Roland Emmerich. In the summer of 1996 I was a preternaturally sulky teenager living in a town I truly loathed. There was a lot of to-do about that year's Fourth of July blockbuster -- Independence Day. It was the first big-budget action film with a black actor (Will Smith, then considered a television and pop star with very little movie success) in the lead role. The "Entertainment Tonight"-type shows had pieces on every night fretting about whether moviegoers would accept that the fate of the free world could be held in the hands of a black man.

Then and there I (sulkily!) forged a logically tenuous but utterly convinced metaphysical connection to his situation. If Will Smith could save the planet from an alien invasion (and make a lot of money doing it) then I could get out of this crappy town. You know some of the rest of this story -- Independence Day grossed $817M worldwide and launched Smith into a stratosphere of fame and fortune that few ever reach. And while my trajectory for success wouldn't qualify as a blip on his radar screen, I have managed to avoid methamphetamines, the LDS church or being impregnated by a member of the Aryan Nations. Which might seem like a low bar to clear, but judging by the attendees of my last high school reunion, puts me in at least the 95th percentile of the place I once called home.

I share this little yarn to provide a bit of context for the leeway I've been giving Emmerich for the last decade. Even though Godzilla had abysmal CGI and was predicated on the idea that Matthew Broderick was a scientist.. it also had a dinosaur, and you can't hate a dinosaur movie. That's just un-American! The Day After Tomorrow had endless Dick Cheney sight gags and the New York Public Library was a key location -- nothing not to love about that. 10,000 BC featured Camilla Belle, who is darling. And perhaps the less said about Mel Gibson-starrer The Patriot the better.

But Emmerich's latest, 2012, has finally breached the limits of my spiritual generosity. This 2.5 hour slog employs the Emmerich go-to themes of ancient = authentic, mystical and all-knowing; while modern = soft-minded, lazy and effeminate to bring the Mayan prediction of the world ending in the titular year to life. The earth's core has heated up so rapidly that the crust is shifting, causing massive worldwide tsunamis and earthquakes. Everyone will be killed who is not invited to participate in the multilateral, top secret survival program that is first explained as being a series of spacecrafts but later we learn consist of three super-duper cruise ships. The film spends an arduous 45 minutes setting up the science of what's happening and the elaborate governmental conspiracies that are hatched to save works of art, zoo animals and millionaires at the expense of doing anything to prevent mass human casualties or political scandal. The implicit message being, "let me show you what will happen next since when this happens for real no one will be coming to save you." That's fine, I long ago accepted that the necessity caffeine and naps hold to my day to day happiness means I would be better off dying in the first wave of human annihilation.

Emmerich has always skated by with broad racial and cultural stereotypes, plot holes so gaping that two pieces of information provided in the same scene will contradict each other and our lust for images of chaos and destruction. But there was always an essential goodness to his lead characters that we could project ourselves onto. It's how hero mythology in the American action-adventure genre works. We tell ourselves, "If this nightmare were really happening, I would rise to the challenge to be a hero. I'd save myself, I'd save my family, I would save MANKIND." Yet 2012 is essentially just a hokey family melodrama, with millions of people dying in the backdrop, that has such a fundamental loathing for all of its characters and viewers that it is a thoroughly painful and joyless exercise in cinema-endurance.

And while massive human collateral damage could be understood to be happening in his previous Earth-enders, we never saw so much of it take place on-screen as in 2012. Maybe I'm just being a bit humorless about the crass commercial use of 9/11 imagery, but we never used to see people running for their lives from burning buildings wiped out with the sick glee Emmerich has here. Their deaths were often opined in somewhat exasperating monologues, but there was at least an implied humanity. In 2012 we see main characters killed in exceptionally brutal fashion, their deaths completely unremarked upon by surviving family members.

I bring this up not because I mourn the loss of a great thinker or film-maker -- my past affinity notwithstanding -- it's not as though cinema would lose a pillar if Emmerich was physically consumed by a giant, soulless machine (like one of 2012's more courageous characters who commits the ultimate misdeed of not being a part of a nuclear family at the time of the apocalypse) the same way his soul was mulched a long time ago. But the fact is, corporate movie studios spend a lot of time and resources studying us. And they don't outlay hundreds of millions of dollars manufacturing and marketing movies that they don't have some assurance are going to connect with a broad audience. Even if 2012 doesn't repeat the massive financial and star-making success of Independence Day, something has clearly shifted in our culture in the last five years to convince a few dozen executives and rows of bean counters that intimate, graphic images of massive human destruction can now be expected to make us laugh and cheer even in the family-friendly PG-13 holiday fare.

Oh, and the CGI sucks.

Comments

[Sam]

I really liked 2012. One of the best movies in 2009.

[Hoodia]

But what about other topics, why are you telling me all the time about the same?

[Boracay Accommodation]

I really could what they feel when you watch 2012 on a Dolby Digital equipped theater.

[Babs]

2012 really got me off my seat when I watched it at home. The events in the film are similar to what happened in the days of Noah.

[amankumar1236]

Thank you for reviews. This movie is looking to be quite interesting. I hope I will watch this movie very soon.