FILM REVIEW 2012

The end is near – sound familiar?


Cinema
Daniel Carey

WHILE visiting New York in August, I saw a double-sided poster with two brief messages and a website address. ‘The Mayans warned us’, read the first. ‘Find out the truth,’ said the second. Interested parties were directed to visit www.thisistheend.com.
I thought the advertisement was the work of nutters – perhaps the same people who were organising a petition to ‘stop Obama’s Nazi health care plan’. But the poster was actually publicity for the disaster movie ‘2012’, which has just hit our screens.
Given that director Roland Emmerich was behind ‘Independence Day’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, it’s no surprise that ‘2012’ centres on the destruction of the planet. The title comes from a (hotly disputed) idea that the Mayan calendar predicted the world would end in 2012. This time what’s responsible for mankind’s impending doom is not aliens or global warming, but the displacement of the earth’s crust. It’s pure hokum, but as escapist nonsense goes, you’ll see worse.
What you may not see – at least until Oliver Stone makes ‘JFK 2’– is nonsense of such ridiculous length. Having gone to a 17.30 screening (that’s half five in old money), it was nearly 2012 (or should I say 20.12) by the time I re-emerged. One hundred and fifty-seven minutes is a long time to stay in the cinema.
That said, there is – as you might expect – plenty of action. Volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis do their worst. As well as billions of people, scores of iconic buildings come under attack. The White House, the Empire State Building, St Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel, and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro are all in the firing line. The special effects are at times mind-boggling, the set-pieces are exciting, and overhead views from an aeroplane allows Emmerich to let his imagination run wild.
The scope is certainly ambitious. We veer from Washington DC (where President Danny Glover gets conflicting advice from nice scientist Chiwetel Ejiofor and nasty Chief of Staff Oliver Platt) to California (where John Cusack has got wind of the apocalypse from conspiracy theorist Woody Harrelson). We watch miners in India and construction workers in China. The rest of the world was dismissed almost in a single line in ‘Independence Day’ (when US President Bill Pullman was told: “They’ve taken out London”), but there’s a more global feel this time around.
There are some nice touches. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tells everyone not to worry, just as his live press conference collapses in disaster on live TV. “We’re going to need a bigger plane,” Cusack notes with a nod to ‘Jaws’. The South Pole ends up in Wisconsin, and Queen Elizabeth adopts a ‘not without my corgis’ approach to the coming catastrophe.
But the script (co-written by Emmerich and Harald Kloser) leaves a lot to be desired. “Like this cup, you are full of opinions and speculation” doesn’t sound any less daft for coming out of the mouth of a Buddhist monk. There are some bizarre sub-plots – a faux-profound exchange between the US government scientist and the president’s daughter (Thandie Newton) and a pointless argument over whether Cusack hates the new man in his wife’s life.
Cusack is always likeable, but like many characters, he’s under-explored. The denouement seems to go on for ever, and it’s hard to focus on the ‘triumph over adversity’ parts of the story when the carnage has been so widespread. It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine) isn’t as funny an idea as it used to be.