Reviews Movie: 2012
November 14, 2009 by celebstar
Filed under Movie News
If, as is believed in certain fringe circles, the world will come to an end in 2012, at least there will be no more movies like this one made. Perhaps the strangest thing about 2012 is that the bad parts of the film are among the most enjoyable, because they’re so over-the-top ridiculous that it’s impossible not to break out laughing. It’s the mediocre sections that bring the production down, and there are far too many of them. Despite having only enough content to adequately fill a 60-minute slot, 2012 turns into an epic slog of more than 2 1/2 hours. It seems a lot longer. Load up on strong coffee beforehand. Not only will that be needed to keep you awake, but it will provide a bathroom break excuse to escape the theater once or twice. Of course, once free of the auditorium, you may find the lure of the exit door too sweet to pass up.
The idea that the apocalypse is set for December 21, 2012 isn’t a new one. Doomsayers, always looking for the next possible date for the planet’s destruction, have latched onto this one because it represents the end of the Mayan calendar. I’m sure Nostradamus predicted it as well, because the poor guy gets credit for predicting everything. Count me among the skeptics, and not just because there’s no credible scientific evidence to support a 2012 lights-out, but because the true believers preach it with a religious fervor that’s a little scary. I won’t lose any sleep over it and feel confident that the world will be pretty much the same when I wake up on December 22, 2012 as it will be the day before. I won’t be postponing shopping for Christmas presents in the hope that the end of the world will save me the agony.
I can’t say whether the so-called “science” represented in Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is the most embarrassing misrepresentation of geology, physics, and astronomy ever offered in a big-budget movie, but it has to be close. This shouldn’t be surprising, however, since Emmerich is far less interested in staying true to the laws of the physical world than he is in destroying things. With 2012, he aims not only to top his own previous excesses (which include Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow) but to out-explode Michael Bay and steal the disaster crown from Irwin Allen. Pretty much every kind of imaginable catastrophe can be found in this film. Earthquakes? Check. Volcanos? Check. Collapsing skyscrapers? Check. Uncontrolled fires? Check. Raining ash? Check. Plane crashes? Check. Capsized ocean liners? Check. Tsunamis? Check. John Cusack as an action hero? Check – say anything, but not that!
Of course, the average movie-goer conned out of $10 to see this movie will not care about characters, which is a good thing, because there aren’t any. And he or she won’t care about a storyline, which is also a good thing. No – the driving motivation for anyone to see 2012 is mayhem. Things blowing up. A shitstorm of special effects. So, does that aspect of the movie at least live up to expectations? Sadly, no. Yes, there are some impressive scenes of havoc, but they’re not as spectacular as one expects. And there’s a disappointing lack of recognizable icons biting the dust. The city whose destruction is chronicled in the most detail is Los Angeles, which is arguably one of the most structurally generic cities in the United States. No Empire State Building. No Sears Tower. No Space Needle. Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Buenos Ares, and the Vatican get token screen time, but those are almost afterthoughts. I assume Emmerich decided not to go after New York this time because he’s already traveled that route and it may seem less-than-entertaining after the real-life horrors of 9/11.
Another problem with the disaster sequences is that they last too long, are too repetitive, and are mixed with some of the most preposterous action scenes ever devised for a motion picture. Not only are we treated to the astonishing sight of a limousine being chased by the cracking and buckling of streets during the earthquake that destroys Pasadena, but that’s only the appetizer for when our heroes flee the pyroclastic flow created by the Yellowstone super-volcano (by RV, foot, and plane). This reduces the concept of outrunning a fireball to the level of a nursery school feat. Some degree of silliness is expected in a big-budget disaster movie, but what happens in 2012 is so over-the-top that it’s impossible for a thinking person to dismiss the absurdity of the situation.
2012 follows the traditional disaster film formula: first act setup (in which various dire pronouncements are made about the future of the human race), second act payoff (in which 75% of the special effects budget is exhausted), and final act resolution (in which the heroes do heroic things that save the human race, or at least part of it). There’s a large roster of characters, which truncates the screen time of them all and destroys any chance of someone emerging as more than a foreground decoration for the special effects. There’s no suspense because one doesn’t care whether the characters live or die. Their fates are a matter of indifference, which makes all the “excitement” near the end rather ho-hum.
The first significant person we’re introduced to is Dr. Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a scientific advisor to the President (Danny Glover). He is the bearer of bad news: during a recent trip to India, he uncovered evidence that the world is on the fast track to destruction. It’s 2009 when he makes this discovery; three years later, his prediction is reaching fruition. He’s one of the leaders of an international team assembled to investigate the problem and develop a solution by which the human race will not end. His immediate superior is Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), who is prepared to take emotion out of the equation when it comes to who lives and dies – something Adrian, the President, and the First Daughter (Thandie Newton) can’t do. As the destabilization of the planet accelerates, plans have to be adjusted.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles-based fiction writer Jackson Curtis (Cusack) is on vacation in Yosemite with his two kids when news of a massive earthquake in the city causes him to head home, but not before he has a heart-to-heart with an Art Bell-type radio show host, Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson). Charlie informs Jackson that the world is about to end. He gives him the whole spiel about the Mayans and December 21. (Although, curiously, the events in this film seem to take place during the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2012, not during the last fortnight of the year.) Jackson and his kids arrive at the house shared by his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet) and her plastic surgeon boyfriend, Gordon (Tom McCarthy), just as the final dissolution of Los Angeles is beginning. So everyone hops in Jackson’s limo and they get the hell out of Dodge. Their destination is Yellowstone, where Charlie claims to have “maps” of the “space ships” being designed by the government to save humanity.
There are other characters, too – an Indian geophysicist, a pair of old coots on a cruise ship, and some people in Tibet – but they have even less to do than the main group.
The cast is more formidable than one might expect from a glorified B-movie. Clearly the actors, knowing the identity of the director and having read the script, could not have been under the misapprehension they were embarking upon the second coming of Citizen Kane. Yet, Emmerich managed to nab the usually reliable John Cusack, Oliver Platt, and Danny Glover, the ethereal Thandie Newton, the increasingly prominent Woody Harrelson, and quirky character actor Chiwetel Ejiofor. One can assume that looking at the cast list for 2012 may provide insight into whose portfolio was damaged in the 2008 stock market dive.
2012 HD TRAİLER:
Apparently, the start of production for 2012 was impacted by the writer’s strike. In ordinary circumstances, that might provide a partial explanation for the poor quality of the screenplay, but the reality is that movies of this sort are generally not blessed with top-notch writing. Scripts are nothing more than skeletons. The flesh and muscle are the visual effects and, when these are found wanting, as is sometimes the case during 2012, the production resembles a picked-over carcass. When it comes to disaster movies, I’m an easy mark – I liked dumb fare like Twister, Volcano, and The Day After Tomorrow. But I can’t give 2012 a pass. It’s long and boring and in some ways even less bearable than Transformers 2.
Source: reelviews. net
Review 2: 2012
The Mayans called it: It’s 2012, and the world is really ending. So as buildings tumble, oceans flood and people fall into the earth, what failed novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) really wants is to reconnect with his wife (Amanda Peet) and kids.
The buzz: I hated writer-director Roland Emmerich’s last logic annihilator, “10,000 B.C.,” yet I’m oddly excited for the wild spectacle of “2012.” Perhaps the filmmaker’s latest—which runs a hefty 158 minutes but at least boasts a good cast, including Chiwetel Ejiofor as the head geologist and Danny Glover as the U.S. president—will combine crazy special effects with a premise that (cough) isn’t a complete joke otherwise.
The verdict: Hasn’t Emmerich (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “Independence Day”) made this movie several times? Same laughable dialogue. Same hokey family crises. Same outrageous heroism, including a character holding his breath for what seems like forever and a car that drives faster than the earth can disintegrate. (There’s also wink-wink action like a grocery store splitting in half moments after someone inside says, “I feel like there’s something pulling us apart.”) Aside from a couple solid action sequences, this bloated epic is exhausting instead of exciting and sentimental but not sad. The technology’s new and improved, but nothing else is.
Did you know? Even in a time of crisis, a political advisor (Oliver Platt) still takes the time to note that the president’s daughter (Thandie Newton) is attractive. Ladies, gentlemen: Debate those priorities.
2012 Cast:
Running time: 158 minutes
Rated: PG-13
Cast:John Cusack -
Jackson Curtis
Chiwetel Ejiofor -
Adrian Helmsley
Amanda Peet -
Kate
Oliver Platt -
Carl Anheuser
Thandie Newton -
Laura Wilson
See full cast
Danny Glover -
President Thomas Wilson
Woody Harrelson -
Charlie Frost
Tom McCarthy -
Gordon Silberman
Liam James -
Noah Curtis
Morgan Lily -
Lilly Curtis
Zlatko Buric -
Yuri Karpov
Beatrice Rosen -
Tamara
Alexandre Haussmann -
Alec
Philippe Haussmann -
Oleg
Johann Urb -
Sasha
John Billingsley -
Professor West
George Segal -
Tony Delgatto
Stephen McHattie -
Capt. Michaels
Patrick Bauchau -
Roland Picard
Jimi Mistry -
Dr. Satnam Tsurutani
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Director:Roland Emmerich
Genre:Action, Drama, Science Fiction
Source: chicago.metromix. com
2012
Review 3: 2012
It’s not so much that the Earth is destroyed, but that it’s done so thoroughly. “2012,” the mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set-up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly.
This is fun. “2012″ delivers what it promises, and since no sentient being will buy a ticket expecting anything else, it will be, for its audiences, one of the most satisfactory films of the year. It even has real actors in it. Like all the best disaster movies, it’s funniest at its most hysterical. You think you’ve seen end-of-the-world movies? This one ends the world, stomps on it, grinds it up and spits it out.
It also continues a recent trend toward the wholesale destruction of famous monuments. Roland Emmerich, the director and co-writer, has been vandalizing monuments for years, as in “Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Godzilla.” I still hold a grudge against him for that one because he provided New York with a Mayor Ebert and didn’t have Godzilla step on me and then squish me.
In all disaster movies, landmarks fall like dominos. The Empire State Building is made of rubber. The Golden Gate Bridge collapses like clockwork. Big Ben ticks his last. The Eiffel Tower? Quel dommage!
Memo to anyone on the National Mall: When the Earth’s crust is shifting, don’t stand within range of the Washington Monument. Chicago is often spared; we aren’t as iconic as Manhattan. There’s little in Los Angeles distinctive enough to be destroyed, but it all goes, anyway.
Emmerich thinks on a big scale. Yes, he destroys regular stuff. It will come as little surprise (because at this writing the film’s trailer on YouTube alone had more than 7,591,413 views) that the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy rides a tsunami onto the White House. When St. Peter’s Basilica is destroyed, Leonardo’s God and Adam are split apart just where their fingers touch (the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel having been moved into St. Peter’s for the occasion). Then when Emmerich gets warmed up, the globe’s tectonic plates shift thousands of miles, water covers the planet, and a giraffe walks aboard an ark.
Also on board are the humans chosen to survive, including all the characters who have not already been crushed, drowned or fallen into great crevices opening up in the Earth. These include the heroic Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) and his estranged wife, Kate (Amanda Peet); President Wilson (Danny Glover), his chief science adviser, Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and his chief of staff, Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt).
Many gigantic arks have been secretly constructed inside the Himalayas by the Chinese, funded by a global consortium, and they’re the only chance of the human race surviving. Along with the animals on board, there’s the maybe well-named Noah (Liam James). In theory, ark ticketholders represent a cross-section of the globe, chosen democratically. In practice, Carl Anheuser pulls strings to benefit the rich and connected, and wants to strand desperate poor people on the dock. I’m thinking, Emmerich often has a twist when he names villains, like Mayor Ebert from “Godzilla.” So how did this villain get his name? What does “Anheuser” make you think of?
Such questions pale by comparison with more alarming events. The tectonic plates shift so violently scientists can almost see them on Google Earth. This havoc requires stupendous special effects. Emmerich’s budget was $250 million, and “2012″ may contain more f/x in total running time than any other film. They’re impressive. Not always convincing, because how can the flooding of the Himalayas be made convincing? And Emmerich gives us time to regard the effects and appreciate them, even savor them, unlike the ADD generation and its quick-cutting Bay-cams.
Emmmerich also constructs dramatic real-scale illusions, as when an earthquake fissure splits a grocery store in half. Cusack is the hero in an elaborate sequence involving his desperate attempts to unblock a jammed hydraulic lift that threatens to sink the ark. He does a lot of heroic stuff in this film, especially for a novelist, like leaping a van over a yawning chasm and riding a small plane through roiling clouds of earthquake dust.
The bottom line is: The movie gives you your money’s worth. Is it a masterpiece? No. Is it one of the year’s best? No. Does Emmerich hammer it together with his elbows from parts obtained from the Used Disaster Movie Store? Yes. But is it about as good as a movie in this genre can be? Yes. No doubt it will inflame fears about our demise on Dec. 21, 2012. I’m worried, too. I expect that to be even worse than Y2K.
SOurce: rogerebert.suntimes. com
Review 4: 2012
Don’t worry, be happy: The dog survives in 2012 even though billions of people don’t. The unfortunate masses — innocent as their four-legged fellow creatures but traditionally more expendable in disaster epics like this one — die in ways it takes Armageddon-movie master Roland Emmerich and a mighty army of CG artists to devise. For starters, Los Angeles cracks and falls into the sea, Las Vegas crumbles, Yellowstone National Park becomes a volcanic hellpit, India is devoured by a tsunami, and the Catholic faithful in Rome are buried under the rubble of their own magnificent church buildings. Cool! Oh, and also? A cruise ship on the high seas upends with a harrumphing glug-glug, sinking to join its colleagues the Poseidon and the Titanic.
God forgive me, but I enjoyed the nerve-racking silliness of this newest, loudest exercise in destruction. (And God help us all, now more than ever I think cities could crumble and oceans could rise.) Emmerich is, of course, an old hand at bangs, a manipulator who thinks whimpers are for sissies: Aliens tore up the place in Independence Day, an irradiated lizard stomped through Godzilla, global warming ruined everyone’s plans in The Day After Tomorrow, and you don’t want to know all the troubles the prehistoric hero known as D’Leh done seen in 10,000 BC. This time, as the story opens in 2009, the earth’s core is heating up and acting all wonky, alarming an earnest U.S. government geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He rushes to inform the White House chief of staff (Oliver Platt), who rushes to inform the President (Danny Glover), who eventually confides the news to his tremulous daughter (Thandie Newton). Cut to three years later, and a California Everyman named Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) picks up his cute son and daughter (Liam James and Morgan Lily) at the home of his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her new guy (Tom McCarthy). Jackson takes the kids camping at Yellowstone, where he meets a useful mountaintop crazyman (Woody Harrelson) who predicts the end of days.
The good news: Thanks to the crazyman, when the end of days begins to make itself known, the Curtis family (plus the ex-wife’s new guy) are able to stay one step ahead of the abyss. This postnuclear clan has a terrific ability to drive on roads that cave in behind them, and fly (in half-borrowed, half-skyjacked airplanes) between toppling buildings, bridges, mountains, and fireballs. Enthusiasts of websites involving the Mayans’ apocalyptic predictions are welcome to join enthusiasts of websites involving planetary instability to discuss the facts behind this chaotic fiction; biblical scholars are welcome to chime in on the meteorological conditions that coincided with the launch of Noah’s Ark. Me, I’m more charmed by the now-classical way in which Emmerich uses scenes with human interest — you know, the introduction of a handful of characters we care about — to offset the sense-battering showpiece action sequences. (Those are usually the ”feelings” scenes in which we laugh with nervous relief at the familiarity of human puniness.) Just ask Steven Spielberg: There’s nothing like imminent destruction on a world scale to make a father want to heal a broken family.
Cusack, with his one-of-the-guys face and his nice way with child actors, does creditable work as an Average American Dad trying to put things right. Of course, Emmerich (and his co-writer, Harald Kloser, who also co-scripted 10,000 BC) is never one for subtlety. Average Dad’s homegrown virtues are contrasted with the thick-lipped, fat-bellied crudity and obscene wealth of a Russian oligarch (Zlatko Buric) looking out for his own two young sons. Meanwhile, as Commander-in-Chief (in the idealized mode of 24’s President David Palmer), Danny Glover is a good father to the country and his own daughter; however, we know his chief of staff is a cold SOB because he’s distant from his aged mother.
As for Ejiofor’s geologist, he gets to tell his dad he loves him before the end draws nigh. Which, in this rock-solid disaster-pic formula, makes him the perfect character to deliver the climactic speech that unites mankind. Well, it’s either him or the dog. B
Source: ew. com
Review 5: 2012
Apparently determined to end his career with a bang as the ‘disaster film’ director of record, Roland Emmerich has thrown everything imaginable at the screen in this mother (nature) of all destruction flicks. With the world about to implode, a select group of people are determined to survive and preserve the human race in this impossibly ludicrous guilty pleasure. Silliness aside, 2012 will undoubtedly be a worldwide box office smash, luring any moviegoer willing (and able) to turn off his brain and go along for the 158 minute thrill ride.
Emmerich, the force behind other end-of-life-as-we-know-it epics like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and even good ‘ol Godzilla (1998) has outdone himself with this global disaster tale that blames the world’s impending end on natural causes. A series of non-man made calamities befall the planet starting with earthquakes in California and worse as a growing tsunami makes its way to China, taking out everything and everyone in its path. Emmerich and his co-writer Harald Kloser are smart enough to know sheer chaos would not cut it without compelling human characters to root for … and then watch die. Central to the plot is loser author Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) whose brilliant novel led to the breakup of his marriage to his wife Kate (Amanda Peet) who, consequently, has recently taken up with another guy named Gordon (Tom McCarthy). Still the ever-protective Dad, Cusack heeds warnings from nutcase Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) and gathers up the family just as the apocalypse begins its deadly march. Meanwhile U.S. President Wilson (Danny Glover), aware for a few years that all this was coming, presides over a plan to create a Nemo-like Nautilus contraption that key government officials from around the world will use to ride out the storm. Harrelson is somehow privy to information of the exact whereabouts of this race-saver and has maps to help Cusack and company find it.
With over-the-top car chases, plane chases and every other kind of chase, this CGI wetdream of a movie keeps the special effects houses in business as every significant monument from the White House (why is Emmerich determined to gut this place in film after film?) to Rio de Janiero, to the Vatican goes down, down, down. With some witty touches (a takeoff on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is a hoot) and lots of unintentionally funny dialogue, 2012 (which gets its inspiration from the Mayan calendar predicting major “changes” in that year) somehow manages to keep us riveted for over two and a half mind-boggling hours.
Although the true stars here are the visual effects wizards, Cusack cashes in whatever indie-cred he’s had in the past to sock this dumb stuff home. Amanda Peet is very good at looking worried/terrified while McCarthy as her boyfriend comes in handy as an ace pilot after just two short lessons. Glover is stoic as the President while Chiwetel Ejiofor is just too damn earnest as his all-knowing science advisor. For that matter so is Thandie Newton, as the President’s humorless daughter. Harrelson is a riot as a low-rent radio host and would-be prophet who foresees the world’s end and Oliver Platt steals every scene he’s in as the highly manipulative Chief Of Staff.
Theater owners need not worry as Sony’s holiday destruction derby is anything but a disaster and should fill their coffers all season long.
Distributor: Columbia
Cast: John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton.
Director: Roland Emmerich
Screenwriters: Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser
Producers: Roland Emmerich, Larry J. Franco and Harald Kloser
Genre: Action Adventure
Rating: PG-13 for intense disaster sequences and some language.
Running time: 158 min.
Release date: November 13, 2009
Source: boxoffice. com
Review 6: 2012
This is not a movie for Oscars or subtlety. There is no BAFTAS or even Golden Globes here. Even though I do see some MTV awards. To be straight to the point. If I wanted to I could tear this movie apart but instead I am going to be honest and tell you that I really enjoyed it. It is a Roland Emmerich end of days film that gives you everything you want to see from a Roland Emmerich end of days film. The film is chock full of cameos , musical crescendos and everything is right in your face. But like I always say…… Well what did you expect?
Let’s get the little plot out of the way so we can get onto the other stuff. The film is based on the Mayan prophecy that the world will end in 2012 and adds the scientific part about the sun going apeshit and boiling the earth’s core. This then creates earthquakes and a shift of the planets alignment and for earth’s crust to shift. The typical world ending/disaster film plot extends with the father (John Cusack) who is estranged from his kids and the bonding that ensues as they race from the disasters. We get to see the dilemmas of the world leaders (Oliver Platt and Danny Glover) as they try to come to terms with the impending doom. Then of course we have the scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers the disaster and the Wacko prophet (Woody Harrelson) who is turns out to be right. We also get to see a couple of other characters and for one reason or another they are all connected and they all interact. They all race to escape the initial disasters to get to the top secret government ARK’s that were designed for the future of mankind.
The film has a good cast of characters and talented actors and they all do the best they can do with what they have. The everyman John Cusack is still the charming dude you knew from Say Anything and is cool to watch as he says everything in that slightly sarcastic way of his. His ex wife Amanda Peet is in a throwaway role as is the rest of the family but they are added to bring some form of human drama in amidst the chaos. Chiwetel Ejiofor is consistent as always as the scientist and voice of reason. This man is a damn talented actor and this flows from the screen. He is the future and will be the next Denzel Washington. His role is the film isn’t groundbreaking but his interaction with his father on the phone is the first disaster movie sequence that got to me. So Kudos, Roland and Chiwetel.
Now we get to the special effects and they are almost flawless. I watched this on a huge screen and the audio was crisp. If there was any crap in the visuals I did not see them. The whole epic scenes of the world changing is spectacular. You can’t fault it. The destruction of Los Angeles if a breathtaking moment that keeps you biting your nails against all your better judgement. I also hate the thought of gigantic waves as drowning at sea scares the crap out of me and my heart skipped a beat when the waves hit anywhere in this film. I just hate big waves. Special effects were a standout as it should be and this is definitely on my Blu ray list.
2012 is the movie that is best described as the greatest hits of disaster movies. Just when you think Roland won’t go there –Yep, he went there. Surely, He won’t mix a volcano movie , a wave movie with Titanic-Yep, he went there. He can’t destroy every damn monument of any worth in the whole entire world- Yep, he went there. He won’t let the dreadful line from the maintenance man “It’s flooded, you can’t go down there it’s a suicide mission” get filmed- Yep, he went there. This is Roland Emmerich pushing the disaster movie to its inevitable peak. He pushes the boom, crash, opera of the film so hard that it borders on parody but luckily stops just before (okay, just over in some scenes) You can’t judge this film against anything else as it created for it’s purpose and it does it well. Don’t go to this film with anything apart from a desire to watch an in your face , out of this world, crazy, huge, epic disaster film. This is made for the fans and only for them. Go see it just for the closing line that will be up there with the classics. Go see it for the biggest movie explosion on scene and for the scariest natural disaster ‘what if ?’ created so far. Good stuff., not brainy but not meant to be.
Source: cinefools. com
Review 7: 2012
he notion of playing God is implicit in the job of a film director, and rarely has the sense of a wrathful, vengeful deity at the helm, albeit a pagan one, been so comprehensively felt as in “2012.” For demolition maestro Roland Emmerich, “Independence Day,” “Godzilla” and “The Day After Tomorrow” were mere appetizers for the lip-smacking smorgasbord of global annihilation laid out here. This simultaneously spectacular and risible concoction looks likely to trigger a worldwide B.O. tsunami for Sony.
Hooking their doomsday scenario on an interpretation of a Mayan calendar that points to an earthly catastrophe in 2012 — specifically on 12-21-12 (what movie will pin its release to that date?) — Emmerich and writing-producing partner Harald Kloser begin by dumping Los Angeles into the sea and follow with the destruction of Las Vegas, Yellowstone National Park, Washington, D.C., the Vatican, India, Tibet and a giant cruise ship.
Anyone who stops to think about it between grabs of popcorn might pick up the hint that Emmerich is taking particularly gleeful aim at the United States (which other director has destroyed the White House in his films not once but now twice?) and Catholicism (he goes out of his way to detail the collapse of St. Peter’s and Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue), while no other religion gets taken to task. But then, that would be taking this eye-popping display of movie pyrotechnics far too seriously. Or not.
Coming up with halfway decent characters with which to populate disaster films has always proved an almost insurmountable problem, but Kloser and Emmerich have brought a measure of wit to the enterprise. Pic’s Everyman is Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a rumpled author whose most recent unsuccessful novel happens to have been called “Farewell Atlantis,” and who never paid enough attention to sexy ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and their two young kids (Liam James and Morgan Lily). He’s now forced to look on as Kate shacks up with Gordon (Tom McCarthy) while he scrapes by as a limo driver for L.A.-based Russian billionaire Yuri Karpov (the very engaging Zlatko Buric).
As SoCal hopes for the best amid an alarming upswing in tremors and cracked streets, government scientist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) alerts U.S. President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover, almost too predictably grave) that increased solar fires (happily, for a change, not man-made global warming) are about to turn the Earth inside out in a way not experienced since the day the dinosaurs died.
While Wilson’s chief of staff, Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), readies the evacuation of the elite and the president deliberates about how to preside over the planet’s final chapter, Curtis leads his kids on a series of escapes and near-misses worthy of Indiana Jones — in a limo, RV, private plane (flown by nonpilot Gordon), giant Russian cargo jet and, ultimately, the biggest vehicle ever built. The action is preposterous by any standard, but that’s designed as part of the fun; eye-popping indeed are the sights of the streets of Santa Monica rippling like so many ocean waves, molten meteors spewing out of Yellowstone, the sea claiming a ship the size of a football field and a six-engine jet crash landing on a Himalayan glacier.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy scripting the final act of a movie about the end of the world when you don’t really want the final image to be a charred rock. Let it be said that “2012” plummets from reasonably distracting spectacle to sheerest silliness when, in the pointlessly protracted final reels, it tries to maintain interest in the (confusingly staged) jeopardy of a handful of characters when much of the world’s population has already been wiped out or is about to be. Never has Rick’s observation in “Casablanca” been more true, that the problems of a few little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
On any level other than as sheer visual sensation, “2012” is a joke, for the simple reason that it has no point of view; the film offers no philosophical, metaphysical, intellectual and certainly no religious perspective on the cataclysm, just the physical frenzy of it all. But to ask this would be taking the picture far too seriously. Or not.
In Cusack and Ejiofor, “2012” has two actors who convey above-the-norm intelligence for characters in this sort of fare, although even they can’t keep up the pretense as the film degenerates. Most casting choices are agreeably offbeat down through the ranks, with Woody Harrelson supercharging his scenes as a wackjob radio sage who issues on-the-air reports from the front lines of destruction.
Except for some patchy work when St. Peter’s crumbles, the visual effects are pretty sensational, delivering the cutting-edge CGI goods auds want and expect. It will be hard to watch “Earthquake” ever again after this one.
Screenplay, Harald Kloser, Emmerich. Camera (Deluxe color, Panavision widescreen, HD), Dean Semler; editors, David Brenner, Peter S. Elliot; music, Harald Kloser, Thomas Wander; production designer, Barry Chusid; supervising art director, Don MacAulay; art directors, Dan Hermansen, Ross Dempster, Kendelle Elliott; set designers, Jay Mitchell, John Burke, Peter Ochotta, Douglas A. Girling, Nancy Brown, Peter Stratford, David Clarke; set decorator, Elizabeth Wilcox; costume designer, Shay Cunliffe; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/DTS), Michael McGee; supervising sound editor/sound designer, Paul N. J. Ottosson; visual effects supervisors, Volker Engel, Marc Weigert; visual effects and digital environments, Uncharted Territory; visual effects, Scanline VFX, Double Negative, Pixomondo, Hydraulx; special visual effects and animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Digital Domain; special effects supervisor, Mike Vezina; stunt coordinator, John Stoneham Jr.; associate producer, Kirstini Winkler; assistant director, Tommy Gormley; second unit director, Aaron Boyd; second unit camera, Don McCuaig; casting, April Webster. Reviewed at Regal Cinemas, Los Angeles, Nov. 3, 2009. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 158 MIN.
With: Liam James, Morgan Lily, Blu Mankuma, Zlatko Buric, Beatrice Rosen, John Billingsley, Chin Han, Osric Chau, Philippe Haussmann, Alexandre Haussmann, Jimi Mistry, Johann Urb, Ryan McDonald, Stephen McHattie, Lisa Lu, Henry O, Patrick Bauchau, Chang Tseng.
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Source: variety. com
Review 8: 2012
When the World Hangs in the Balance, a Reliable Calendar Is Needed
I know what I have against Roland Emmerich — “The Patriot,” for starters — but what does he have against us? He’s bombarded Earth with alien death rays, big-footed it with a rampaging reptile and put it into deep freeze. Now in “2012,” his latest apocalyptic folly, he cracks the planet like a nut, splitting its crust, toppling its mountains and cities, and laying its every creeping thing to inevitable tedious waste.
Maybe he’s angry. (His last movie, “10,000 B.C.,” was widely panned.) To judge from the similarity with which he stages the multiple disaster sequences in “2012” — a limo, a camper, a plane, a bigger plane and some really big boats, by turns, race ahead of the impending doom — he seems exhausted. It’s no wonder. Finding newish ways to cram large-scale carnage into a PG-13 package is tricky. You need enough verisimilitude to hook the audience, but not enough to freak it out: the collapsing high-rises have to look real enough to be plausible, as do the itty-bitty computer-generated figures falling from them. Swirling dust and flying debris serve that commercial purpose, not rivers of blood and body pulp.
And so the dust swirls in “2012,” and debris and bodies fly, though at a careful distance. It all looks fairly convincing and also familiar: if you don’t repeatedly flash on Sept. 11, Mr. Emmerich will surely be disappointed. That gives the movie a cheap frisson, though the larger shivers are supplied by the onslaught of pricey special effects, which have grown predictably snazzier since his last cataclysm. Alas, the clichés of the disaster narrative remain in place. To that ruinous end, the larger catastrophe in “2012” functions as both the trigger and backdrop for a soap opera about a fractured family, standing in for the rest of humanity, which heals as the world falls apart. That’s the idea, anyway.
In truth, the central family here is as disposable as the billions of computer-generated humans that soon pile up after disaster hits. Written by Mr. Emmerich and Harald Kloser (they last collaborated on “10,000 B.C.”), “2012” takes its plot points and shifting plates from both science and fiction, and its title from doomsday prophesies, including a myth about the end of days derived from a reading of the Mayan calendar. Though not much is made of the Mayan angle, the most amusing character, a doomsday prophet and radio broadcaster played by Woody Harrelson, seems in hair, beard and interests to have been drawn along the predictive lines of the real author Daniel Pinchbeck (“2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”).
Mr. Harrelson looks like he’s actually having the kind of good time stupid movies should provide but that this one roundly fails to deliver. Despite the frenetic action scenes, the movie sags, done in by multiple story lines that undercut one another and by the heaviness of its conceit. Humanity is dying, after all, as the television talking heads keep repeating, and while most of the dead are specks on the screen, Mr. Emmerich occasionally brings you close to the calamity. In one scene a musician (George Segal) calls his estranged son, but the phone is answered by the granddaughter he’s never seen. She’s cute, but then her house shakes and she’s gone, vaporized so that a sob can catch in Mr. Segal’s throat and ours.
There’s no time for real tears in movies of this sort, of course, though there’s plenty of space available for synergistic product placement, as evidenced by the Sony Vaio equipment that fills the government offices where the American president (Danny Glover) stoically stands by. Closer to the ground, another patriarch (John Cusack) plays his part as a divorced dad who will be enlisted for the usual heroics, while Amanda Peet rolls her eyes as his embittered ex. Depending on your tolerance for Mr. Cusack’s mugging, she has traded up or down by landing a plastic surgeon (Tom McCarthy). Completing this family portrait are two irritating children, a preadolescent boy (Liam James) and a younger girl (Morgan Lily).
Chiwetel Ejiofor, as some sort of wizard scientist, gets the chance to say “My. God.” several times in a credible American accent while the less-fortunate Oliver Platt plays a sleazy politician who’s equal parts devil and ham. Thandie Newton shows up as the president’s daughter who, because movies like these subscribe to the Noah’s ark theory of onscreen hookups (two of every kind), becomes an eventual romantic foil for Mr. Ejiofor’s character. Somewhere in the Himalayas a young Tibetan monk (Osric Chau) ponders the mysteries of life as his brother (Chin Han) heads off on a secret mission in China where salvation waits onscreen and, presumably, in that country’s contribution to the movie’s global box-office take.
“2012” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Old Testament-style destruction served with a smile.
2012 Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Roland Emmerich; written by Mr. Emmerich and Harald Kloser; director of photography, Dean Semler; edited by David Brenner and Peter S. Elliot; music by Mr. Kloser and Thomas Wander; visual-effects supervisors, Volker Engel and Marc Weigert; production designer, Barry Chusid; produced by Mr. Kloser, Mark Gordon and Larry Franco; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes.
WITH: John Cusack (Jackson Curtis), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Adrian Helmsley), Amanda Peet (Kate Curtis), Oliver Platt (Carl Anheuser), Thandie Newton (Laura Wilson), Danny Glover (President Thomas Wilson), Woody Harrelson (Charlie Frost), George Segal (Tony Delgatto), Tom McCarthy (Gordon Silberman), Liam James (Noah Curtis), Morgan Lily (Lilly Curtis), Chin Han (Tenzin) and Osric Chau (Nima).
SOurce: /movies.nytimes. com/
Review 9: 2012
Alright everyone, let’s calm down and be honest with ourselves. What the hell were you expecting? I was expecting something a whole lot worse, I know that. Let’s back things up. When you first saw the trailer for or clips from 2012, you got a little sexually excited, didn’t you? It’s OK, I won’t tell anyone. At Comic-Con in July, when director and co-writer Roland Emmerich showed an extended clip of California essentially dying from the earthquake to end all earthquakes, I voided my bowels, ran to the men’s room, changed my adult Huggies, and voided them a second time. In the words of a great man who used to write for this very site, “Pants, meet shit.”
And as much as Emmerich has made some colossal missteps over the years (GODZILLA, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, and the worst of all, 10,000 B.C.), the man also knows how to make some interesting if not entirely engaging works, such as UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, STARGATE, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and THE PATRIOT. The guy also knows how to blow stuff up on a spectacular scale; what he has failed to do time and time again is draw even somewhat believable characters that seem like anything more than gameboard pieces to be moved around, screaming, running, looking terrified, and occasionally die.
Emmerich has gone from destroyed buildings to leveling cities to, in 2012, ending life on Earth by making the planet’s crust essentially crumble under our feet. So what do you think 2012 is about? Is it about trying to stop the geothermal forces of the universe that are causing the earth to die? Of course not, that would be silly. So what we are left with is finding out how the leaders of the world would deal with about three years’ warning about the end of the planet. What would they save, who would they save, what would they build that could sustain the coming apocalypse and house everything and everyone they wanted to keep alive? To say these are weighty questions would be an understatement, but they are ones that are legitimately posed in this film.
But 2012 isn’t a movie about philosophy and morals (OK, it is a little); it’s a film about destroying the planet city by city, nation by nation. You think the destruction of California sequence looks impressive, wait until you see Yellowstone Park turn into the world’s largest volcano, or the massive tidal wave that wipes out the Eastern Seaboard. As an act of kindness to his audience, Emmerich has even built into his 2-hour 40-minute movie scenes of such lameness and inaction that they might as well be scrawling the words “Pee Break!” across the bottom of the screen while they play. This might be the most well-paced Roland Emmerich film ever made.
He’s even cast a slightly more interesting group of actors to use as his game pieces. John Cusack provides the requisite Everyman quality to his character as a failed writer/limo driver who just happens to be at all the right places at the right times to survive wave after wave of intense destruction. Amanda Peet plays his ex-wife and mother of their two kids (giving Cusack something to protect), while Tom McCarthy plays her new husband, a decent guy who the kids actually love, which makes Cusack all the more jealous. In the scientific/government community, we have Chiwetel Ejiofor as the geologist who first realizes the true extent of the threat as far back as 2009 (hey, wait a minute… ). Oliver Platt is on hand as his superior and link to the President (Danny Glover… I’ll give you a second to let that one sink in), whose daughter (Thandie Newton) is also deeply involved in his work. Woody Harrelson is tossed in as a kook living in Yellowstone, broadcasting a Pirate Radio signal predicting the impending destruction. One character makes the very interesting point, “Isn’t it funny how all those guys with cardboard signs were right?” Indeed.
So how does it all hold together? Pretty well, to tell the truth, for about the first two hours. I won’t reveal where all of this evacuating and running around leads to, but there actually is a plan to save hundreds of thousands of carefully selected citizens of the world. It’s a little underwhelming. More than that, it’s silly and illogical. Yes, I’m calling only a small portion of a movie about the end of the world silly and illogical. And what’s worse, the film drags and hinges on some pretty stupid stuff at the end as well. It isn’t an impending wall of water that threatens the survivors; it’s a stuck door. And there’s a speech that Ejiofor delivers just before all hell brakes loose for the few remaining humans that is so stupid and ill-timed as to be laughable from beginning to end. If someone had shot him at that moment and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” at that moment, I would have applauded. There are also characters like a Russian businessman and his two chubby twin boys who are incredibly annoying and clearly aimed at giving us unnecessary villains in a movie where the world is the only villain we need, thank you very much.
Whereas most disaster movies of the past have been two hours of build up followed by 20 minutes or so of awesome destruction, 2012 keeps it coming and only lets up long enough to let us know exactly who died and give us time to hit the bathroom. Even if you loathe the movie to its very fiber as a storytelling endeavor, there’s no denying the spectacular nature of the special effects. And no, special effects are never a sole excuse to see any movie, but I think there’s more here than just that. I also believe that if 2012 had come out during the summer, it would have given TRANSFORMERS 2 a run for its money as the most successful film of the year. This is a summer movie event film that you don’t have to completely turn your brain off to enjoy, and that’s a rarity that I can get behind. The take-no-prisoners 2012 finally sees Emmerich pulling tools off his belt that work together rather than just clanging into each other at the job site. Most of this film is highly watchable, and some of it approaches greatness.
Source: aintitcool. com
