2012 Review

   Earlier this year a movie was released and it was known as Knowing, it was pretentious crap for how the end of the world concept was taken and put into a story that started off interesting and eventually disintegrated into an uninteresting one, destroying the very planet we live on. More recently, Roland Emmerich returns to his special effects heavy film making with 2012, its basically his previous venture, the Day After Tomorrow, being a great disaster movie in its own right, but instead labels it as said end of the world moniker, with a scope thats heavier and surely isn't meant to directly attack a real world issue. It instead truly markets its self as a no frills special effects tech demo of sorts, but it is even less than the average high budget, no substance action flick that is a complete embarrassment to commercialized action films, failing at almost everything it attempts.

   The basic concept of the film is that solar flares from our sun are becoming becoming a threat, slowly boiling Earth's core, which would eventually cause the crust to break, leveling cities, raising the sea level, etc. This could've been either a film about the international disaster's social and political struggles or trying to follow a family trying to survive this, but it tries to do both, having multiple familys, political figures and others intertwining together in, while not confusing, but altogether awkward way. When the film begins with scientist Adrian Helmsley(played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), it isn't all bad, but it goes downhill quickly when it introduces Jackson Curtis(played by John Cusack), who is interested in the future world threat along with Jackson's ex-wife, her boyfriend, and children. These characters, on paper aren't terrible but the amount of others introduced are too diverse and all poorly executed like a myriad of racial stereotypes, and a condescending conservative battling Adrian the entire way, some characters only being there to be killed off later. The amount of characters thrown into the mix is obscene, many of which are embarrassing(Woody Harrelson's being especially stupid), and because of the amount of "main" characters none can have a bond built between them is downright awful when certain ones are consumed by the disaster. This is marred mostly by the pitiful acting, when worst comes to worst some characters don't seem realistic and the entire way through terrible one liners are spat out, much of the dialogue is unnecessary, irrelevant, and idiotic and the director needs to learn comedy, if its not funny, don't bother writing it. Its below B movie quality to say the least, and its wrapped around a 200 million dollar budget, and worse you have to stand it for more than 2 and a half hours and too much should have been trimmed. 


   As much as the movie is unlikable in terms of substance, the movie wont attract anyone for that, the action and special effects are what 2012 will be known for, and believe it or not, it isn't all that polished in this department either. On paper, the scale and detail of it all is impressive, but in certain sequences like the one where the family escapes California shows some of the worst action sequence editing i've seen on the big screen. It sounds like the amount of chaos going on around during this sequence wouldn't be a problem, but the amount of focusing on explosions of certain objects, deaths, and at one point a silly sequence of a car with two senior citizens crashing is stupidly comical, repetitive, and takes out the enormity of the situation and indirectly defeats the entire purpose of having the effects in the first place. That and many sequences obviously use the green screen effect and it honestly looks sloppy and forces the movie's standards below the average set today. Never have I seen a film whose editing actually takes the special and effect out of special effects. It's not entirely that the sequences are bad, a bigger issue is that its the only way to take a break from the poor acting, leading the movie down this downward spiral where there's a careless story then the only way to take a break from that is too watch action sequences that happen too be quite messy, but when the victims do escape, you have to further suffer acting that doesn't feel human, then go back and forth through more characters that can't be cared about either are either killed off (with absolutely no drama whatsoever) or are kept to further frustrate. 


   Bigger is not better, and even though I never saw The Day After Tomorrow in theaters, that movie had the ability to impress on the small screen even more than 2012 does on the big one. Nothing here works, even though the story picked up towards the last 45 minutes or so when some of the human race made it too modernized arks, showing some form of the survival element of the movie but it was continued to be marred with been there done that "if we don't save these lives, then our humanity is lost" factor, and a seemingly endless stream of deadly obstructions that are almost magically dealt with one after another. This is how bad the movie gets, a scene where an entire cruise ship sinks is less dramatic than the one sinking ship sequence in Pirate Radio; a comedy film's survival sequence is better than one found in a modern action flick. The creation of these huge landscapes falling apart don't live up to the awe factor and standards of the movie industry where movies portraying more focused ones like last year's phenomenal Dark Knight do regularly. Even if you weren't coming to see the story at all, the fact that its 2 and a half hours is not worth it and the story, even if none of the other movie's problems were fixed, the film could have lasted just 90 minutes, i've occasionally felt that some films could've been lasted half an hour less, but never a full hour. This is simply put the most frustrating mainstream action movie released since Superman Returns, at all costs do not give the creators money for this atrocity, if you feel its entirely necessary to attempt to prove me wrong, watch it illegally first.


1.5/5