If you make a disaster movie, then the disasters better be damned good. Instead, this proved to be another dud for director Roland Emmerich who had a cult hit with “Stargate” and a solid box-office hit with “Independence Day”. Almost everything he did after that, though, can be shoved into the dustbin of film history.
THE ORIGINAL REVIEW
Director Roland Emmerich returns with yet another disaster film in the form of “2012”. This time, it is not an alien threat or another ice age that threatens humanity. This time, it is the Earth itself and no landmark, be it the White House or the Vatican, is safe from Emmerich’s grasp.
The film starts off simply enough with a couple of scientists in 2009 discovering that the neutrinos being released by the Sun have mutated and now the Earth’s core is heating up. It also turns out that the scientists’ initial projections are wrong and the Earth’s crust displacement is going to happen sooner than expected. Not surprisingly, this will happen in the year 2012.
The movie then movies forward to the Summer of 2012 and the audience meets Jackson Curtis (John Cusack). Curtis is a small-time novelist and a divorced father of two and he heads to Yellowstone with his two children in tow. While camping, Curtis meets Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) who proceeds to inform Curtis that all is not well and the earthquakes that are being experienced across the globe are going to get worse.
With this newfound information, Curtis does everything in his power to get his family to safety. Meanwhile, officials at the White House are trying to follow through with a plan that will hopefully save mankind from the impending doom.
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| John Cusack attempts to survive multiple disasters in "2012". |
The biggest problem with this film is the special-effects that drove the film’s budget up to $200 million. The film hangs on the ability of the effects to capture the audience’s imagination. However, the effects make the film come off as a video game without the gameplay.
Actually, in all fairness, the effects are worse than some of the video games that are out there. The bigger the effects get, the worse they look. Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day” contained special-effects that were mostly done using practical effects with some CGI elements and they still look better than the effects contained within this flick.
Another big problem with the movie is that it is all over the place. There are too many characters and it is hard to follow any one storyline, even Curtis’. At any given point in the film, it follows Curtis for a bit before jumping to the White House officials before then moving on to two old men on a cruise liner which then jumps to some old fart who seems more worried about saving famous art pieces than human lives. If that long sentence made your brain freeze for a second, then you know how I felt throughout the entirety of this film.
The first thing negative about all of these characters is that it drives the film’s running time up to an unbearable two hours and forty minutes. Had Emmerich decided to cut a few of the storylines such as the man who is trying to save the art pieces or the two men on the cruise ship, the story would have been tighter and, at least, a little more entertaining.
Well, that is if Emmerich and fellow writer Harald Kloser had made their main characters more relatable and sensible people as well. Curtis himself is one of the worst fathers that has ever appeared in film. He has no problem with putting his children in danger when he should have made them stay behind with their mother. His ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), also does nothing in the film to be proactive. All she can do is scream bloody murder when Curtis runs off into danger with one of their children.
The film is a CG laden mess with too many characters and sub-plots. There are many different ways that one could have spent $200 million and this is what we got? This is easily one of the worst films of the year.
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