When Columbia Pictures come and ask me for a quote on the DVD release of this movie, I will be quoted as saying this… “Ridiculous”…
2012 reaches new heights of ridiculous. The plot is ridiculous, the special effects are extremely ridiculous and the characters are ridiculous.
By now you will have heard the word that the movie is worth watching with your brain in neutral, parked quietly on the side of a cul-de-sac, with the keys safely stored in a concrete bunker 1,000 miles underneath Fort Knox. Which is a kind of ironic statement, considering the movie is based things occurring 1000’s of miles beneath the surface of the earth.
Roland Emmerich’s romp through another world catastrophe is an interesting story based loosely around the Mayan calendar, which ends in the year 2012. The Mayan’s believed that would be when the world ended. With this as the background we follow divorcee Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) as he fights to keep his family alive while the world, and his broken family, tears itself apart.
And… that’s it really… The plot that is…
I know ridiculous, but i did warn you. The plot is awkward, disjointed (with a number of holes in it), and at the end of the day if you had Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal playing the main characters and the world was freezing not melting, you would have The Day After Tomorrow… I sometimes wondered if the movie used the same set.
If Roland Emmerich was trying to send a message with this movie it was lost.. Probably because after about 30 minutes you start to wonder if the classification should have been comedy, and besides you left your brain at home.
The redeeming feature to this flick is the special effects, they are quite amazingly detailed and stunning. Yet afterwards it got me feeling like they had taken some of the most emotional parts of life on planet earth from the last 20 years and turned them into action scenes. References to Princess Diana’s death, 9/11 and other events seem to play an influential role throughout. Did i mention “The Day After Tomorrow”?.. yeah I’m sure there’s a few replays from that too.. Ok so I’m joking but seriously i wondered if i was watching a remake.
There was a very strong humanist feel to this movie, with a number of very strong “God has left you” type themes being played out in the movie, and in fact it became part of the game to see what Roland was going to do next to paint “God” in poor light.
However at the end of the 2 and a bit hours of the world falling apart i felt entertained, possibly because i needed a little bit of mindless escapism. And that’s just it.. This movie is a great piece of mindless escapism.
Reviewed by: Skip Parker
Starring: John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Amanda Peet, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, Jimi Mistry, Thomas McCarthy
Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Duration: 2hr 38mins
Rated: [M] Content May Disturb
