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DokBrowne [ 6.0 ]
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Most everyone has a soft spot for some unsophisticated type of movie or another. Shark movies, Steven Seagal, teen romances, Adam Sandler, Tyler Perry?, serial killer thrillers, the cute animal (dog, mostly) family picture, kung fu epics, those low-budget horror or sci-fi flicks that always get dumped in theaters on the first months of the year, whatever. Well, I wouldn't call disaster films my weakness per se, because I don't often enjoy them (I even hated "The Towering Inferno"), but I always WANT TO have a good time with them. Big casts, bigger set pieces, large-scale FX destruction, the melodramatic grandiosity of the "what if" gimmick (what if aliens invaded earth/you were stuck in a burning high rise/your cruise ship capsized/the polar ice caps melted), waiting to see which celebrities don't survive. Plus I'm susceptible to the maximalist approach to any kind of entertainment; going over the top and to the extreme invariably yield cheerfully bombastic thrill-rides. And few are as grand-scale in their crowd-pleasing endeavors as Roland Emmerich. The man loves big things destroying the world in big ways, and not since "ID4" have I more anticipated his latest project than I did with "2012". Forget the excuse - all that Mayan calendar end-of-days superstition is about as alarming as the threat of mummies and werewolves (prove me wrong, future! Or don't, actually.) - just the fact that he's smacking down the entire earth this time and we've got the trailer footage to prove it was enough to hook me. The movie isn't non-stop cataclysmic catastophe as it promised to be, so once again we face a movie that is far more effective in miniaturized advertisement format than as an entire thing (see also: "Black Dynamite", a B+ movie with an A+ trailer that rendered its full-length version inessential), and the human drama stereotypes are exhaustingly stupid, but we do get a lot of pretty huge disastering. Of course it might've had a better "wow" factor 15 years ago, before half of all summer movies every year featured record-breaking explosions and spectacle, but "2012" still sets the high point for disaster pics as far as scope. For cinema, the only conceivable next step will be to not pussy out and actually destroy the planet (with the survivors inevitably heading off in a spaceship or something). No going back now; if there's a big disaster movie next year where the entire United States explodes for 2 straight hours: yawn.
But like I said, and as any sane person should know, you gotta be braced for a movie like this, not because it's all massive and loud and mind-blowing but ironically because it's so fucking ridiculous down on the ground floor where all the normal movie mechanics (characters, relationships, dialogue) are taking place. The coincidences and dramatic conveniences and contrived human conflicts are staggering: the same 3-4 main characters are present exactly where and when every major disaster occurs on Earth, and as in all Emmerich productions the people can out-run spreading disaster instead of being instantaneously engulfed in them, as should be the point (in order to contrast our puny individual size against the monstrous possibilities of mother earth gone awry). People argue and fight as though the screenplay were worried about having enough tension between the world coming to an end one continent-sized apocalypse at a time. Someone even gives a guy the finger when she sees he's being left behind to die, because he was a jerk to her. Yeah so he's being helplessly killed by natural forces, ha ha stick it to him lady! Machinery doesn't work when it urgently needs to and ideologies clash so we spend what seems like half-hours at a time fixing a little jam in an engine or watching one noble soul convince the world to try to save more people, ugh.
John Cusack is the deadbeat divorced dad but he's Cusack and he's up front so he's the hero who redeems himself. Another central player is his wife's new husband, who's great with their kids, responsible, loyal, and the only one capable of piloting them all out of certain death about 8 times in a row, yet he's sort of a stick in the mud, so fuck him! He dies like a forgotten chump in the end.
And most egregiously of all is Oliver Platt as the presidential aide, who spends the entire movie reacting realistically and rationally to the situation. You agree with everything he says - sure, it would be great to help everyone but there's only so much we can do with limited time and resources, and if we try any more than that, then no one at all will have a chance, and everyone dies. That sucks, but that's the difficult truth here. Touch call, but it's our only hope. Nope! The movie plainly explains that his position makes sense, but because it isn't all-encompassingly idealistic, because it's actually challenging and not totall inclusive, we get Chiwetel Ejiofor as his kind-hearted colleague, willing to defy the logic of their survival plans and jeopardize everyone in order to help every single last person on earth, and instead of being the crazy one (as would be the case in an INTERESTING movie), he's the lovable good guy and Platt's the cold villain. Such bullshit.
The movie is all frustratingly simplified Hollywood-processed logic like that and annoying contrivance, but it's easy to get swept up into it with all the convincingly executed tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanos, and explosions. All the small-scale parts of the movie are unmistakably awful, but if you like spectacle, try to endure
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.6 |
| No. Ratings | : 2 | |
| No. Reviews | : 1 | |
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