2012

2012

Yes, yes, I know it’s Thursday and I saw the films on Monday. I just haven’t had much time to draft posts recently. With Monday being St Andrew’s Day and East Renfrewshire council really pushing the Homecoming celebrations we got the day off and I decided to use it partly to veg out at the cinema.

I’d hoped to catch up to 8 films over the weekend, but workload cut me down to two. First up:

2012

What a remarkably silly film. A lot of the impact of this insane effects-fest was lost on me as screen 7 at Cineworld in The Forge Shopping Centre is about the size of my old front room. I swear the TV I bought a few month ago is larger than the screen.

Plot-in-a-nutshell: the earth’s going to end, people panic, things explode or get washed away and the companies that sell software to make shonky CGI giggle into their bankbooks.

It’s Roland Emmerich, the guy who washed the world away in The Day After Tomorrow and blew up the White House in Independence Day. Only this time he’s not messing. Why blow up a few buildings when you can tilt an entire town on its side and drop it into the ocean?

This is a disaster movie on a grand scale. The shame is, the scale’s so big it’s just hard to comprehend and it seems to lose all impact as a result. Look at the classic disaster films like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure (even the remake wasn’t bad). Big-name actors in a tight situation with peril at every corner and they could die at any time. Your wage bill had no say on whether you survived or not.

There is just no sense of peril in 2012 at all. At no point was I tensing up thinking “are they going to get out of this?” because they always do. There isn’t a bit of originality in it apart from the size of the thing.

John Cusack is adequate as the lead character – a divorced father who ends up trying to save his kids (very Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds). Danny Glover is adequate as the President of the USA. Woody Harrelson is adequate as a nutjob. Everyone’s adequate. It’s a plot-by-numbers.

SLIGHT SPOILERS: I rarely put these in so you’ve had a warning. This is like Independence Day with earthquakes and water. The President sacrifices himself to help save others. The White House explodes. A man saves his family. Someone gives an impassioned speech about humanity that brings everyone together.

It’s all been done before. And even the effects aren’t that great. They’re simply too big to be taken seriously. And despite all the money thrown at it, the limo in the early “chase” sequence still has all the realistic physical motion of one of the vehicles in PIXAR’s Cars.

But, you know, switch your brain completely into standby mode and it’s watchable. Just don’t even consider thinking about the pseudo-science involved. That way lies bad headaches.

[Next review in next post.]

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• 2012 (cinemablend.com)
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• 2012: No end in sight (thestar.com)

The 2012 by Iain Purdie, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.