2012 - A Review.

Director: Roland Emmerich.
Release Year: 2009.
Rating: * *1/2

Disaster movies serve as a pedestal for directors with a sucker for a producer, who splurges money like there’s no tomorrow, in anticipation that moviegoers would turn out to be even a bigger suckers to watch the bloated trash the filmmakers are ultimately going to churn out. Nothing wrong with that practice, except that the movie is sucked dry of any substance, and audiences are rendered as nothing more than zombies drooling at the larger-than-life cinematic tricks called CG.

Don’t take my rants out of context, because I’m not here to rebuke the latest offering by the over-the-top director Roland Emmerich, who specializes in turning absurdities and half-baked, unfounded and unsound scientific theories into a staple diet for his every outing as a director. A glance at his repertoire would lead anyone to the conclusion that he’s adept at making movies based on outrageous assumptions and sometimes, he does deliver on them. “2012” for me did deliver; at least on the brainless, popcorn-munching, gaping, occasionally awe-inspiring ride.

Let’s get down to nitty-gritty, called the plot. Err…, my mistake. I forgot there for a moment, that this is a DISASTER MOVIE, and in that universe, to use the term “plot” is blasphemy. Okay, let’s call it an excuse for a plot. Dr. Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a geologist, along with an Indian astrophysicist Satnam, through their (cough) “empirical” methods have reached the horrifying conclusion that neutrinos, a product of heightened solar activity, have intensified exponentially in recent times. As a result, these particles have started to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere, and the resultant change has started to manifest itself on the planet, which previously was unheard of. The earth’s core is sweating like million pigs crammed into a 10x10ft cell, and the heat is only going to ratchet up. This finding takes place in the year 2009, and soon, Dr. Helmsley, brings this to White House Chief Of Staff, Carl Anheuser’s (Oliver Platt) notice, leading him to sound alarm bells across the world, albeit amidst only the selective individuals presiding at the highest position. In the following years, governments across the world, undertake a mammoth, yet, a clandestine endeavor of funding a billion-euro operation which entails constructing ships of unprecedented dimensions, comfortable enough to accommodate 400,000 people. Anyone, exhibiting the galls to blow the lid on this operation, is executed secretly in "accidental" ways, and stuffed and dismissed in the next day’s paper as one of the random tragedies. However, all of Dr. Helmsley and his colleagues’ predictions about the assumed path the impeding catastrophe will take have been upended, and the devastation is arriving at their doorstep sooner than they had dreamt off. The government can’t call for worldwide evacuation plan without risking mass panic. So they decide to keep it below radar, and let their citizen in on it at the very last minute, so that they could at least bid farewell to their loved ones.

With the above exaggerated scenario being the plot of the movie, all the characters are mere milestones, around which the movie is set to traverse and reach its predictable climax. Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) as a failed author, is now working as a limo driver for a pretentious, condescending Ukranian hotshot. As for Jackson’s personal life, he has a son who dislikes him, and a loveable daughter who adores him to the core, but an opportunity missed with his love, Kate (Amanda Peet), who’s now living a content suburban life with a new and an understanding man Gordon. On a routine camping trip with his kids, Jackson walks into a fortified spot, where the effects of imminent disaster have started to make itself apparent. It’s there that Jackson meets a goofball character called Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), a radio jockey, and a soothsayer who, apparently, is already aware of the governments’ efforts in sweeping the news about cataclysm that’s close at hand under the rug, and the radical approach afoot at an undisclosed location in China; the place where the aforementioned ships are being built for the upcoming exodus. Obviously, Jackson brushes aside all the mumbo-jumbo Frost spews about the world coming to an end, and dismisses him as yet another conspiracy theorist. However, that pretentious dismissal is very short-lived when the landmass of California starts to sway violently and break apart, and every structure standing soon starts crumbling down. With a breathtaking ride through the world falling apart on the sidelines, Jackson makes it in time to pick up his kids, Kate and Gordon, and set out on another round of astonishing escape through dilapidating high-rises, and the persistent chasm that tails them throughout.

After the initial setup of the premise, the movie moves at almost breakneck speed, stopping occasionally to refuel with woody emotional scenes, and some ethical dilemmas thrown in as a food for thought after the circus is over. However, this is one movie where no one would give a damn about the emotional repercussions the apocalypse is going to leave on the human psyche, nor will anyone stop to give their two cents on the forced moral turpitudes the higher officials adopt when they decide to cherry-pick people from the administration worldwide. The remaining ones, fated to be the survivors, are the ones with obscene bank balance, capable to pay billion euros for their seat, leaving your average Joe out in the cold. None of that would matter when the visuals start to kick in.

One disconcerting thing is that the director couldn’t come up with avant-garde complications and variables to have his visual department play with. I mean, apart from, maybe, a couple of scenes, nothing else seems original. You have a volcano eruption followed by the spewed huge balls of lava, raining like meteors, a la “Armageddon”; then a tidal wave of the size of a 100-storey building converging on the state of Washington DC, a la “Deep Impact”; the finale where one of the ship gets flooded due to some malfunction is reminiscent of both “Titanic” and "Poseidon”. After lifting scenarios from such better disaster flicks, “2012” is left with little space to improvise and fill the scene with something of a biblical magnitude. As mentioned earlier, couple of scenes do stand out as being truly spectacular. One being the narrow escape from California, when earth starts to open itself and devour everything that stands in its way, while Jackson and all the other characters that are in the thick of all this mayhem, drive their way through the nature’s onslaught. Other is the scene, even though it’s just a tad improvement over its plagiarized source, where after a gigantic volcanic eruption, the following lava somehow takes the form of huge balls of fire, and starts raining over its vicinity spanning miles. The visuals were indeed worth admiring.

Apart from the digital manipulation, there’s nothing worth noting. Acting is woody and preachy, which is expectant of in such no-brainers. Apart from a handful of principal characters, all others are just required to deliver corny lines in the face of mankind’s extinction, while some breeze through their scene like there indeed is no tomorrow. All that the director had to do was create a bigger and a louder visual extravaganza that the masses would be obliged to pay for. Of course, Roland does a good job in this regard, simply because he knows the trick of the trade. It’s only the visuals that would compel anyone to take the effort to watch and sit through this mindless entertainment. Just don’t go in with any expectation at all, and you’re guaranteed to have a fun-filled ride.