'2012': Beautifully Destructive

by Brett Parker

If I absolutely had to choose my least favorite genre of cinema, then I would probably select the disaster film. I know I’m supposed to be dazzled by grandly destructive special effects, but mostly I just see cardboard characters laboring endlessly to escape preposterously hazardous scenarios. While these films are meant to shock us with their displays of destruction and warm us over with a hidden sense of humanity, very rarely do these films shake things up in a shocking way or free their characters into perplexing depths. Of course there has been some exceptional disaster flicks over the years, but nowadays they feel few and far in between.

2012 would more or less be just another disaster flick if it didn’t set out to be the mother of all disaster flicks. In annihilating Planet Earth as we know it, director Roland Emmerich (Stargate, Independence Day) pulls out no stops in throwing every catastrophic force of nature he can think of at our beloved planet. Over the course of this film, we get thumped with lava, earthquakes, tsunamis, meteor-like boulders, the whole works! In watching these elaborate effects sequences, it becomes extremely difficult not to notice the earlier films this one borrows so heavily from. We can easily spot shades of Earthquake, Poseidon, Dante’s Peak, Armageddon, Speed 2, and Waterworld (yes, even Speed 2 and Waterworld!). This makes 2012 feel like a greatest hits album that rounds up all the big gems you want into one satisfying package.

The film opens sometime around 2009 and shows members of Earth in a state of apocalyptic suspicion. A geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) notices that the Earth’s core is showing dangerous signs of disruption. The U.S. President (Danny Glover) learns of a recovery plan to protect mankind from some kind of worldwide disaster. The President’s Daughter (Thandie Newton) is part of a plot to store away the world’s most valued artifacts and discovers certain colleagues are being mysteriously killed. Just what is going on here? A crackpot DJ (Woody Harrelson) may just hold the answer: the Mayan prophecy foretelling that the world shall end in the year 2012 is materializing to be true and within a couple of years, the planets will align and Earth as we know it shall crumble into oblivion.

Sure enough, 2012 rolls around and the Earth begins to tear apart violently at the seams. The plates of the Earth begin to break apart and cause devastating Earthquakes across the globe. The lava from the Earth’s core begins to shoot out from underneath and transforms all sorts of landmarks into deadly Volcanoes. The disruption of these land masses cause devastating tsunamis to drown out much of the world. Basically, all hell breaks loose. We see these nightmarish events through the eyes of an author named Jackson Curtis (John Cusack, playing a character that bears 50 Cent’s real name in reverse-ha!), who tries to save his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), and two children (Liam James & Morgan Lilly) from as many threats as possible. His plan consists of traveling to China, where it is rumored that an enormous shelter of some kind has been destructed to save a fraction of mankind. They achieve this through the help of Kate’s plastic surgeon boyfriend (Tom McCarthy) who is able to fly them around in a stolen plane (a plastic surgeon who knows how to fly a plane…of course!)

Roland Emmerich has apparently spent his Hollywood career fashioning himself as some kind of “master of disaster.” He fancies blockbuster tales of simplistic and virtuous people who become threatened or attacked by ominous, dreadful, and hostile forces. His movies try to convey the message that humanist values will always persevere in the face of an overwhelmingly damaging threat. While this can be an effective lesson, his efforts to make it feel heartfelt come across as too plastic. We just don’t feel like there’s any real heart or inspiration in his “human” characters. Emmerich always employs talented actors who labor hard to make catastrophic bystanders convincing, but there’s too little juice present in the characters to make us actually care about them. It’s always more special to see a disaster film favor characters over action sequences (Peter Weir’s Fearless is a wonderful demonstration of this).

In a world that has seen 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and the collapse of the American economy, do people really need to be reminded of a prophecy that states the world will collapse within a few more years? Does Emmerich truly believe that in these bleak times, people want to see images of life as we know it blown to complete smithereens? Perhaps Emmerich suspected his film could work as some sort of release therapy for paranoid and fearful people. After all, moviegoers attend these films to vicariously work out their anxieties and fears over deadly catastrophes striking their very own world. Maybe this was the perfect time to release a 2012 film that can truly strike a chord with audiences.

I suppose, then, that it’s good news that Emmerich allows a heightened yet hopeful optimism to infect the film’s third act. The closing scenes show the leaders of the world trying to preserve humans, animals, plants, and cultural artifacts into gigantic, spaceship-like Arcs that have been built to withhold the force of outsized forces of nature. These gigantic Arcs make for some nifty special effects work and as implausible as this development this may seem, Emmerich brings it conviction and harnesses it towards an exciting final act. This even leads to a Spielbergian ending of mind-blowing sunniness. While a more thoughtful director may have admirably forced us to endure a more complex and uncompromising conclusion, it Emmerich may have slyly put some of our more paranoid anxieties about 2012 at ease and I’m actually rather grateful for that.

2012 is entered next to Stargate, The Patriot, and Independence Day on my list of Roland Emmerich films that are entertaining and effective, as opposed to his hopelessly boring efforts, The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 B.C. The running time can be taxing and the character developments are rather shameless, but the effects scenes are so epic and mind-blowing that they truly deserve a look on the big screen. For let’s face it, people will be lining up for big time action and not for intelligent dialogue and thoughtful characters. Now if a filmmaker were to come along and put all three of those ingredients into this genre, then we could very well have a masterpiece on our hands!