According some interpretations, reportedly questionable, of the ancient Mayan calendar, that culture had December of 2012—the exact date is debated, but sometime around the Winter Solstice—set aside for Doomsday. The premise of Roland Emmerich’s new film 2012 is that the Mayans nailed it.
If this is the case, then Emmerich & company have done humankind a profound disservice. This grandly inane movie is almost certainly the least frightening cataclysmic vision ever, & it’s hard to imagine anyone over the age of ten taking it seriously. It’s the end of the world as we know it, but you’ll feel fine.
To some extent, I knew this going in. I had already laughed out loud at the lengthy special-effects set-piece scene shown in the trailer & TV ads, in which the everyman hero, limo driver & struggling sci-fi writer John Cusack, frantically drives his family to the Santa Monica airport while the surface of the greater L.A. area buckles away just behind the car like a ruined soufflé. Cusack pilots the car around, over or even straight through one collapsing edifice after another, & despite the extravagance of the visuals, the sequence carries absolutely no sense of real danger or threat—it feels, rather, more like an externalization of the emotional state you’re in when you’re running late for an important meeting.
In the film, this scene arrives, I’d guess, maybe forty minutes in. Up to that point, the story’s other hero, pure-hearted geologist Chiwetel Ejiofor, had unfolded some reasonably effective pseudoscientific babble explaining why planetary alignment and solar eruptions were about to make the earth’s core throw a tantrum. But once Cusack & company’s wild Buster Keaton ride begins, any claim on our authentic eschatological dread simply caves in faster than the earth’s crust. Funnier still, Emmerich is so fond of this chase gag that he offers it up two more times in the course of the film.
Thus 2012 starts to seem like a sort of Epcot Center of the Apocalypse: we see Yellowstone Park destroyed, then Vegas, then Washington D.C., then Rome, and so forth. I can’t say I found the spectacle boring, but there’s isn’t a whiff of horror or pity, or even much variety—as with other thrill rides, the various episodes of ruination start to seem much the same.
Another part of the reason why there’s so little true power to 2012 may be that it’s apolitical & amoral. Humans aren’t the cause of this—it isn’t happening because of environmental hubris, or out-of-control technology. There’s no suggestion that this is even the Wrath of God come upon us for decadence—about all we seem to be guilty of is ignoring the Mayan calendar, & even if we hadn’t, we couldn’t have stopped it.
Laughable though the picture is, I hung in there with 2012 for the first two hours. The large cast is full of capable hands: Amanda Peet as the ex-Mrs. Cusack, Thomas McCarthy as her new, plastic-surgeon hubby, Danny Glover as the President, Thandie Newton as the First Daughter, Oliver Platt as a skunky White House official, Woody Harrelson as an Art Bell-style mad talk-radio prophet, & such other usual suspects as George Segal, Blu Mankuma, Jimi Mistry & the ever-reptilian Stephen McHattie. I was especially amused by Zlatko Buric’s slowed-down Boris Badenov tones as a shady Russian bigwig.
But as the movie slogged on into its final half-hour, it ran out of fun for me. The climactic scenes, with Ejiofor passionately insisting that there’s room for more people on the international survival ark on which he has a berth, & Platt taking the con position, followed by a long struggle to get the ark’s jammed door closed, are gruelingly tedious.
The movie’s major distinction, perhaps, is commercial: The very last lines of 2012 are a product placement. Some things even Doomsday can’t destroy.
