The End of the World is Nigh!

Rating: 8/10 (17 November 2009)

As a child, my favorite parts of the Bible were those chapters that dealt with large-scale catastrophe – the Deluge, the plagues delivered upon Egypt, Moses commanding the Red Sea to crash down on the pursuing Egyptian army, Sampson tearing down the Philistine Temple. I've never really grown out of it. I love to see cities destroyed. I call it Apocalypse Porn. '2012' is the greatest example yet.
So, the sun expels an unusually large number of neutrinos which somehow, against all the laws of God and nature, are converted into microwaves that boil the Earth's molten mantle to a level where the crust and tectonic plates start blowing apart. Well, so much for the 'science'. Over the next two hours, a Super Volcano rises up in Wyoming, Los Angeles disintegrates into a very big hole, the American Midwest ends up around the South Pole, tsunamis breach the Himalayas, and the President of the United States survives a toppling Washington Monument only to be taken out by the supercarrier USS John F Kennedy crashing down from the crest of a tidal wave. Yes, you heard me right - the Capitol is flattened by a massive ship carried from Philadelphia on a giant wave. Amongst the chaos, there's the usual story of a divorced father trying to prove his worth to his estranged children through increasingly insane acts of courage/stupidity, blah, blah, blah...
There's an odd political subtext at work extolling the virtues of democracy at all costs. Oliver Platt, as Carl Anheuser (Karl Rove/Anheuser Busch/George Bush – get it), is the nearest thing the movie has to a villain, and his scheming persona is expressed through a desire to save only the greatest minds in the world. The 'good' and 'noble' characters, exhibiting a dangerous level of naivety, wish to open salvation to every mouth-breathing cretin in the nation through a national lottery. Personally, when it comes to the continuation of human civilization, I think a Nobel Prize-winning physicist kind of beats out Bubba from Georgia on the priority list, but maybe I'm as amoral as poor Carl Anheuser. The sight of a caricatured fat Russian leading the rebellion against a capitalist meritocracy like the Bolshevik hoards running at the Odessa Steps adds just one more layer of weirdness to the movie's political viewpoint.
The story, as it should be, is the bare minimum required to get us from one spectacular set piece of biblical destruction to the next. The world has never before been consumed so lovingly and in such detail, and the results are magnificent. Personally, I loved the movie as Apocalypse Porn at its finest. I'm willing to concede that those who do not share my fetish and require character development and basic logic will, however, be far from satisfied.