Movie Review: 2012

LITTLE ROCK — Loud and preposterous, blusteringly vacant and at times ruthlessly entertaining, 2012 is the sort of inevitable exploding movie that frustrates description: It’s sort of an Airplane/Scary Movie-style satire pastiche of disaster movies (specifically Irwin Allen disaster movies such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno), backed down just enough that it could be received as a straight sci-fi actioner. In other words, Roland Emmerich has done it again - he has delivered a movie that can pass for either a sunny atrocity or a brilliant black joke.

You might already know the premise - it’s 2012 and just as the Mayans (and the Hopis and rebel saints and seers from apparently every other religious tradition) have foreseen, it’s the end of the world as we know it. Something about the sun spewing out neutrinos that are cooking the earth’s core like a microwave, destabilizing the crust and causing all sorts of havoc.

Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) is the fashionably underemployed writer-cum-divorced dad who’s hipped to the coming apocalypse by Art Bell-style broadcast madman Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) while on a trip with his children in Yellowstone Park. Because Los Angeles is literally cracking up, Jackson’s ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet)demands that Jackson return them to her and her imminently dispensable plastic surgeon boyfriend Gordon (Thomas McCarthy).

They get there just as California begins to slide into the ocean (as the mystics say it will), so Jackson piles everyone into the limousine he drives for his day job and outdrives the calamitous earthquake, only to arrive at the airport where he has hired a plane to get his family out of Dodge, only to find the pilot dead. But guess what? Gordon is a fledgling pilot (that’s why he’s still alive!) and so they takeoff just as the ground beneath them gives away.

So you see what it’s like. It’s all breathlessness and green screen fakery that occasionally borders on obscenity. There’s something disturbing about the scenes of collapsing office buildings dumping their human contents into the abyss.

While 2012 pays lip service to the idea that all life is precious, it makes it pretty clear that there are characters we ought to care about and those to whom we shouldn’t bother getting too attached. Do you really think Gordon’s going to make it all the way through the third act to impede the reintegration of the Curtis family?

As incredibly improbable as everything about this movie is - everybody gets linked up in some sub-Crash/Babel kind of way - it’s so seamlessly and professionally realized that if you ignore the dialogue, the coincidence pimpled script and the heavy handed embedding of quasireligious symbolism (there’s a character named Noah and a flotilla of space-age arks), you might find yourself entertained. This is a movie to be hooted at and talked back to. Emmerich revels in taking his virtual sledgehammer to digital facsimiles of the world’s landmarks - the small boy inside leaps with every blow.

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 11/13/2009

Print Headline: Watch out!