Filmociraptor

Roland Emmerich has certainly found his niche, and it's in the "let's go ahead and fuck this world right up" genre. With the exception of the 2000 Mel Gibson starrer The Patriot, you'd be hard pressed to find an Emmerich film where some civilization isn't decimated and left to die as a rotting pulp on the side of the highway of life. And such is the case to about as extreme a proportion with his latest, 2012.

There's really no plot to try and summarize for you. The sun basically curb stomps mother nature sending her into fits of volcanic rage faster than any of the "experts" (who haven't been able to get anything right since Jeff Goldblum in ID4). Now, 98% of the world's population is going to be screwed to the nth degree while four Arks full of the best and brightest from around the globe are poised to withstand the impending doom. None of the characters matter, and very few of them are entertaining rather than annoying.

This movie should have been called "narrowly escaping awesome disasters." There were no less than eight scenes where our heroes in one vehicle or another were zooming away just as the earth crumbled beneath them. Eight scenes...at least. Bare in mind that this movie is only two hours long, so at minimum every 15 minutes they are coming within an inch of their lives in the most epic manner possible. It's tiresome and redundant not to mention that you see clips from every one of these scenes in the trailer.

2012 is an exercise in convenience. The term "deus ex machina" doesn't even begin to describe just how right everything goes for everyone involved in this movie. Pilot is dead? No worries, the boyfriend is a pilot. Plane going down? No worries, we can drive a car out of it and we'll be fine. Need to get on the ark? No worries, there's a family of chinamen tooling by in their shitty pick up, we can hitch with them. Entire world has shifted? No worries, you crash landed about a mile from where the arks are parked. Have you ever reached into your pocket and found 20 bucks you didn't think you had? It's like that except it happens every five minutes and no one seems to question where all the "money" is coming from.

My biggest problem with this movie was the entire plot involving John Cusack and his family. They are useless. In Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, the people featured as prominently as Cusack are trying to solve the problem at hand instead of just running away from it. They easily could have been edited out of the film and saved the slightly bloated run time about an hour and cut this useless disaster porno down to a student film effects demo reel.

Of course the effects look stunning. Emmerich's movies always look great and 2012 is no exception. There's a ton of really rad destructo imagery and you rarely get more than a ten minute respite from all the flashy 'splosions and eye rape going down. It certainly pretty to look at, but that hardly is enough to distract from the rest of the garbage.

2012 fails on every level to be anything even close to resembling a good movie. However, as much as I trashed it, it's really nice to look at and will be lots of fun to experience with an MST3K crowd once it hits DVD. Awful script, uber convenient, spectacular effects.

2.5 stars