2012: A Disaster of a Movie

I went into 2012 not expecting much. I had seen some of the reviews on-line and none of them were flattering. So knowing this, I thought, would allow me to go into the movie with low expectations, thus allowing me to enjoy the movie. I was wrong.

Here’s a quick synapses of the movie. In 2009 the suns starts emitting huge solar flares that act like a microwave in the earth’s core. This causes the internal temperature of the earth to rise. Without going too much into the science part of the movie, this event is what eventually causes the cataclysmic events predicted by the Mayans that will happen in 2012. Mix in a divorced family, a scientist with morals, a noble president, and a government antagonist (besides mother nature) and you have 2012.

I’ll go over what I liked about the movie first. The CGI and special effects in general were awesome. Some of the best CGI effects I have ever seen. I also liked, well, nope that’s it.

When you go see any movie you have to suspend your notion of reality. Especially when you go see a big summer blockbuster or disaster movie. The problem with 2012 is that it no matter how much you try to buy into the movie, it just isn’t believable. For example, a limo is racing through the city trying to beat a huge earthquake that’s right behind it in its rear view mirror. It makes impossible turns, jumps, and gets lucky a hundred times. I was willing to but into that. Here comes the part where it lost me. The limo starts driving through downtown when an entire skyscraper starts to fall in front of it. The limo then proceeds to drive through the falling building, before it crashes completely to the ground, and comes crashes out the other side, landing safely on all four wheels. And there are a hundred other examples where you almost want to laugh, OK I chuckled a couple of times, at what you are watching on the screen. To make things worse they sprinkle in actual science facts in the movie, which would only serve to pull me back to reality. Then the very next scene they want me to believe that cars could drive out the back of an airplane going 700 miles per hour onto snow and no one would get hurt. I wish they had just stuck with the Mayans prediction and stayed away from the science.

Some particular scenes also got on my nerves. Like when Jackson Curtis, the limo driving dad in the movie played by John Cusack, takes his kids camping and helps them jump over a fence that says “No Trespassing” and “Do not enter”. He then proceeds to take them to a lake that has lost all its water and has smoke coming out of the ground. Does that sound safe? Then, to top it all off, they walk right past the rotting carcass of a deer. What parent would do that?

One other major point I would like to say is that the movie was way too long. At 2 and 1/2 hours the movie seems to run on for days. Near the end of the movie I actually was rooting for everyone to die, just so the movie could end. Wasn’t there one person in the editing room who could have spoke up and said “Can’t we make this crappy movie shorter?” I really wish someone had said something.

I could go on for days about how bad this movie was. Instead I’ll just write a long run on sentence that points out other flaws, which will probably be better then going to watch the movie yourself: Doctors who are pilots, net books in the war room at White House, cameras strategically placed under water, planes that defy physics, asking your daughter to go with you on a dangerous mission as the world is ending, bad acting, cliche’s on cliche’s on cliche’s, being rescued every single time, character’s you don’t care about, and so on.

Maybe the prediction the Mayans had about a disaster in 2012 actually was their review of the movie 2012.