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I am now going to say some positive things about Roland Emmerich's latest movie, so I'd better rule out the only rational explanation by declaring I'm in no way related to him.
-- Local show times, theaters.
Emmerich is the kind of director who provokes critics into unleashing biblical floods of bile. He's not quite at Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay levels of "This is the reason Hollywood needs to be nuked from space," but if we subtitle-loving dorks ever deign to get down from our ivory towers long enough to mount a revolution, he might be third or fourth against the wall. When that day comes, I'll find myself saddled with the lonely task of defending him against the torch-wielding mobs.
Because even though I kind of hate it, I could happily watch The Day After Tomorrow on a monthly basis. If you're looking for proof I'm a clueless chump who wouldn't know good art if it stuck its tongue down my throat, all you have to do is look up my somewhat positive review of 10,000 B.C. Yes, Emmerich's stories are outlandish, his characters are shallow and forgettable, and he probably sucks at all kinds of other things too, but I'm enraptured by the worlds he creates on, in the case of 2012, the ones he destroys.
In 2009, geologist Chiwetel Ejiofor discovers solar eruptions are bombarding Earth with a new nuclear particle that will heat the planet's core to catastrophic levels. With the survival of the species at stake, world governments collaborate on a secret project to save mankind or at least a few of us.
Three years later, struggling novelist John Cusack starts to get clued in to what's happening. As sudden earthquakes and shifts in the Earth's crust threaten to destroy civilization, he rushes his family away from the ruins of California in search of the project that could save their lives.
2012 is epic. First, one thing blows up, then a lot more other things blow up, then everything blows up. As this basically mirrors my dreams (the good ones, at least, not the ones where I can't run away from the 50-foot frog), I am, once again, hopeless to resist it.
I suppose if you want to get all picky, you can look at 2012 in another way. As something other than a movie of such outlandishly lurid action that at one point a tsunami-borne aircraft carrier crushes President Danny Glover (seriously) (oh man, that was so awesome I wish I were watching it right now). So if you really want to be the kind of spoilsport who pooh-poohs a conspiracy-spouting Woody Harrelson getting blasted across Wyoming by a volcano, you could go ahead and look at its story.
Or not, because it's pretty crappy. Cusack is Exhibit A that not all writers have interesting personalities, and he's about as developed a character as Mayan Explode-O-Rama gets.
The dialogue's unexceptional. Characters are clearly either good or bad. And every single part of the human side of the plot could be an act in Crazy Coincidence Theatre, from Cusack just happening to work for a Russian billionaire to his ex-wife's boyfriend fortuitously taking flying lessons to them outrunning, out-driving and out-piloting an endless series of earthquakes, collapses, fireballs and floods by no more than two-tenths of a second.
Or its cat-swingingly bonkers premise! Showing a picture of Einstein sticking out his tongue in approval doesn't make it even fractionally plausible that the laws of physics would go away just to screw us over.
OK, so there are 300 reasons why 2012 is a corrosive pile of prettily regurgitated eye-candy. But can it be denied that its CG-monster vision of the apocalypse totally rules?? No, I say! I know only one way to reconcile these contradictions, these key features of what I'll henceforth call "the Emmerich Effect": inventing a new grade just for them. Voila.
Grade: C+++! :(
