A perfect movie that shows what's screwed up about Hollywood

Rating: 4/10 (23 September 2014)

2012 is almost a textbook case of what's wrong with Hollywood.
Why?
Because it very, very neatly showcases a particular perversion of the Hollywood system: What you have in 2012 is a story with a lovely, grand overarching theme--which I'll explain below. But the important idea here in my review is that you could very likely miss this theme because it's been slathered over with a thick, nearly opaque faux-buttery coating of pop-thematics and staid disaster movie over-production.
If the producers could have found it in their hearts to give the treatment over to a winning director whose sensibility (and aesthetic wiles) they could trust, some balance could have been struck and 2012 could have been a fine film.
So, what *is* that excellent-but-buried theme? I tell people that when you pry off the crap, you have a story about "ways of knowing". And, in keeping with grand storytelling tradition, these ways of knowing are discrete, can be counted, and are THREE in number. Which, actually, is kinda cool.
But all that is moot, given the decisions that the producers _did_ make; sorry to say.
Avoid it.