You can just see the board meeting now, can't you?
[A boardroom. Somewhere. Probably Hollywood. Early 2008]
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Alright guys, we're almost there, but we still need a pre-Christmas blockbuster for the end of next year. Something that isn't a sequel, but also something that doesn't have any new ideas with which to confuse the audience. The last thing we need is a country full of half-wits furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to understand the situation.
EXECUTIVE 2: How about a disaster movie? Everyone loves disaster movies!
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Perfect! You're getting a raise. The rest of you, hit me with some ideas.
EXECUTIVE 3: Tornadoes?
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Been done.
Twister.
EXECUTIVE 4: Volcanos?
CHIEF EXECUTIVE:
Volcano. Also,
Dante's Peak. Shudder.
EXECUTIVE 5: Asteroids?
CHIEF EXECUTIVE:
Deep Impact. But I like the black President. We'll keep that. You get a raise.
EXECUTIVE 6: Ape attack?
CHIEF EXECUTIVE:
Planet of the Apes. And, to a lesser extent,
Congo.
EXECUTIVE 6 (doing gorilla sign language): Amy... speak... man
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Yes, yes, Charlie, we've all seen your talking gorilla impression. Anybody else?
[A pause. And then a chair at the end of the table spins around, revealing a deeply cowled figure hunched within. Two withered hands hang from his sleeves and a voice emerges that could perhaps charitably be described as 'crypt-like']
ROLAND EMMERICH: I have an idea.
CHIEF EXECUTIVE [stammering]: M-M-Mr. Emmerich! I... I didn't realise you were here.
ROLAND EMMERICH: Please. Call me Beelzebub.
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Uh... Ok.
BEELZEBUB: What if I was to tell you that we could somehow combine every disaster movie you've ever considered into a single film?... Except for the ape attack. That's just silly.
EXECUTIVE 6: I'd say you were mad Beelzebub. Mad! You can't have a movie without apes!
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Jesus, Charlie, give it a rest. Go on Mr. Emm- er, Beelzebub.
BEELZEBUB: I have heard tell of an ancient Mayan prophecy, a prophecy that predicts that the world as we know it will end in the year 2012.
EXECUTIVE 4: Why, that's just around the corner!
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: So it is. Intriguing. But why 2012?
BEELZEBUB: I don't know, something about planetary alignment. I haven't really checked it out. I just saw something on the Internet while I was looking up furniture prices. Doesn't matter. I'll make something up. Get rid of it in the first five minutes and then never talk about it again.
CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Genius.
BEELZEBUB: But the film will go on for another 155 minutes after that and we will show the ending of life as we know it in excruciating detail. California will slide into the sea. Tsunamis will crush the world's capitals. A volcano will consume Woody Harrelson. God I hate him. There will be tearful goodbye after tearful goodbye. Noble but vain sacrifice after noble but vain sacrifice. The vast majority of the earth's inhabitants will die and we will show it alllllllll. In glorious Technicolor.
EXECUTIVE 2: But, this is a blockbuster. This is supposed to be fun. You’re saying everyone is going to die. That doesn't sound like fu-
[BEELZEBUB makes a cutting gesture with his hand and EXECUTIVE 2 begins to choke. He falls to the ground, coughs and splutters for a while and then is still. The other EXECUTIVES look a little uneasy]
BEELZEBUB: So, does anyone else here think the glorified borderline extinction of humanity doesn't sound like fun?
[Much frenzied shaking of heads from the assembled EXECUTIVES]
BEELZEBUB: Excellent. Then let us proceed.
[FIN]
And here we are - two years and $260 million dollars later - presented with the descriptively named
2012, perhaps the most extravagant depiction of the end of human civilisation that has ever been committed to film.
2012 has been created with all the panache and subtlety you'd expect from Roland Emmerich, the man who also directed, wrote and produced both
The Day After Tomorrow and
Independence Day. A filmography that really makes one wonder what in God's name the Earth and its peoples ever did to Mr. Emmerich. Did they insult his mother or something? Because that's three films dedicated to the mass destruction of humanity in the past 13 years. Not including
Godzilla. And if you thought that
The Day After Tomorrow and
Independence Day really got the boot in to the species, then brace yourself, because
2012 conjures up cataclysm on such an unprecedented and overwhelming scale that it's kinda hard to function in the real world for an hour or two after the movie ends. You just want to sort of lie down and make sure the ground beneath you is still solid. And that you have enough food stored in the bunker to survive a few years worth of volcanic winter.
Technically, the film is undeniably impressive. At that price it oughta be. $260 million puts it fifth in the list of the most expensive films of all time, hovering somewhere in between
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. However the general audaciousness with which
2012 skips through its blistering harvest of carnage makes you wonder exactly how the
Pirates of the Caribbean films actually managed to spend that amount of money. I mean, sure the zombie pirates looked kinda realistic, but this film has the fucking Sistine Chapel rolling onto a group of assembled worshippers. And that’s a throwaway scene in a film that spends at least 120 of its 160 minutes taking us on a really very creative world tour of mass calamity. With that said, some of the green screen effects are surprisingly unconvincing, especially towards the end, but I'm willing to believe that perhaps the cost of depicting the wholesale collapse of Los Angeles into the Pacific Ocean might have meant certain corners had to be cut in other areas of the production. You know, areas like 'the humans'.
Speaking of 'the humans', the cast does, by and large, do an exceptional job of holding the special effects together, especially given the fairly limited character palette that they've been given to work with. John Cusack takes centre stage, bumbling his was endearingly through the action, playing a divorced Dad/failed writer/limousine driver/generally-handy-guy-to-have-around-in-a-catastrophe named Jackson Curtis. Jackson functions as the film’s everyman; the story of he and his family’s attempts to escape the apocalypse serve as the human counterpoint to the powers-that-be’s efforts to save 400 000 or so of the world’s richest and most important people. A somewhat unsavoury process, I know, but probably how such a humanity salvage operation would actually go down. If you only learn one thing from this film, it’s that you should always keep a billion euros handy for each person that you want to see rescued from the end of the earth. Start saving those pennies now.
Cusack is joined by a uniformly adequate cast, which includes Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt (who, despite the end of
The West Wing, is apparently still employed by the White House), Woody Harrelson (as the somewhat overplayed conspiracy theorist/comic relief) and Danny Glover (what is it with disaster movies and black Presidents?). Everyone acquits themselves well - and the acting is potentially better than that seen in most disaster movies - but at a certain level I can’t help but feel that actually discussing acting and character arcs in a movie with such a savage disregard for human life almost seems, I dunno... a little redundant.
And I guess, for me, that’s what really sets
2012 apart from the many other blockbusters that have dabbled in similarly cataclysmic events: the film’s seemingly endless willingness to actually depict the slaughter of its innocent civilians. People are swallowed by waves, crushed by buildings, consumed by fire, hit by a US aircraft carrier, destroyed by explosions and swallowed by crevasses. Again and again and again and again. And again. The movie does go for over two and a half hours you know. And such explosive spectacles are all well and good, but what ended up getting to me is that most of the time Emmerich decided to give these disasters a human face by focusing on a single person or family as the carnage engulfs them. A mother and father and their two children huddle as the Sistine Chapel rolls over them, or a father rings his estranged son just as the son’s house explodes, killing him, his wife and his young daughter. Oh yes, and the father dies about ten minutes later. Even at two and a half hours, this mass extinction business is quite a relentless and wearing process.
Also, as a side note, in a post 9/11 world there's something about seeing people hanging from broken skyscrapers and screaming audibly as they fall to their doom that unsettles me a tad. It's like Emmerich went 'you know what that 9/11 footage was missing? Sound. Let’s make it happen'. And there it is. It’s a... grim spectacle.
In the end, the whole film plays out like an exploration of Jumpin’ Joe Stalin’s famous adage that ‘one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic’. Although in this case it’s more ‘one death is a tragedy, 5 999 600 000 is a statistic’. You see whole cities, countries and continents wiped from the face of the Earth without a second thought, and meanwhile you’re supposed to give a shit as to whether or not John Cusack and his brood actually manage to save themselves from the unending cavalcade of destruction. And I assure you I have no problem with death in cinema, even death on a grand and entertaining scale, but as the main characters tumbled their way to safety in amidst the resounding wreckage of the rest of the human race I was filled with this overwhelming urge to stand up and yell at the screen ‘YOU’RE JUST BAGS OF MEAT. ALL OF YOU. WALKING, TALKING BAGS OF MEAT!!!!’
At which point I was asked politely to leave the cinema. Fascists.
Over the course of his recent films, Emmerich has become modern cinema's ultimate fatalist, nailing his non-stop destruct-o-thons together with the sort of Nihilistic brio typically reserved for sociopaths and particularly destructive cats. They’re technically spectacular orgies of mayhem certainly - and there are any number of ‘holy shit’ moments laced throughout this film, some of which almost make it worth seeing of themselves - but in the end I really just found
2012 an exhausting and somewhat depressing exercise in brutal spectacle and moral vacuity. The film wraps itself up with the expected happy ending package (the characters all learn lessons about life, fall in love, get back together, etc.), but after you’ve spent 160 minutes bathing in the gleeful disdain for human life with which Emmerich drenches his films these days, and have indeed witnessed the almost unremarked upon ending of billions of these human lives, those final few sunlit, pseudo-redemptive minutes end up coming across as either disturbingly facile or depressingly ironic. Either way, the film probably would have been far more entertaining if the humans had just been removed from it altogether, leaving the animated mayhem to do its grisly work. Because when it comes down to it, and for all its technical prowess,
2012 is really just another in the long litany of gargantuan, CGI-loaded films that speak to the fact that somewhere over the course of the last decade the Hollywood blockbuster appears to have forgotten the meaning of the word ‘fun’.
Give me
Terminator 2 any day.
Addendum: For a far more succinct telling of what to expect from 2012, this re-edit of the film’s preview is potentially more entertaining than the movie proper.