The law of diminishing returns: why great effects don't make great drama

Rating: 5/10 (26 November 2009)

Emmerich is a specialist in rah-rah actioners with a penchant for global disaster. He tried alien invasion in his 1996 Independence Day, a world suddenly become uninhabitable via climate change in The Day After Tomorrow, and now -- what? 2012 cynically trades on a superstitious belief that the Mayans were right to predict the end of days in that year. But that's really just a come-on for cultists that's quickly dropped. The arc of the script is more a high-tech replay of Noah and the Flood. While Independence Day was sci-fi hokum, and Tomorrow was just dubious science, the explanation behind Emmerich's latest planetary doom is pure mumbo-jumbo. Obviously this director doesn't care how he gets to his effects, and he inserts the same sets of weepy vignettes and touching family reunions every time.
Emmerich and his Austrian co-writer Harold Klosser borrow a popular (but groundless) doomsday myth that an alignment of planets could touch off disaster -- this time, by making the sun's fires flare up. That in turn makes neutrinos start to heat up the earth's core so tectonic plates divide all over the surface of the planet. No matter to these guys that neutrinos, tiny neutral particles that go through the earth in unimaginable quantity all the time without harm, are the least likely cause of tectonic shock disaster. No matter that the theory of a resulting "crustal shift," derailing the earth from its axis and making the continents slip into new positions, has long been discredited as a real possibility. 2012 isn't sci-fi; it's bogus science, far more completely bogus than Day After Tomorrow's -- and the latter, hokey as it was, was a far better movie than this unrestrained and utterly dumb blockbuster.
Much of the physical action concerns a little broken, and soon happily reunited, family, headed by Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), and consisting of his estranged wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and their kids, Noah (Liam James) and Lily (Morgan Lily). Kate has been shacked up with Gordon (Tom McCarthy), and Noah has transferred his loyalty to this fellow. But that's going to change! Gordon will die a sad but quickly forgotten death and Jackson and Kate will be kissing and Noah and Jackson bonding in an hour or so. Then there's the noble US President (Danny Glover), who elects to go down with the ship, and his high-minded daughter (Thandie Newton), who's been preserving the world's art treasures, or the Louvre's, anyway. A French official spills the beans on this and his car explodes in the same tunnel where Lady Di died: what about that!
Jackson is a hero, and a miraculous survivor, through a multiplication of the kind of narrow escapes that motivated the "Perils of Pauline" serials in the silent era. I'd call this the "Ya doob" effect, using the Egyptian dialect phrase meaning "just barely." In his review of 2012 Anthony Lane put his finger on the basic element Emmerich uses as ""the binding rule of melodrama, which decrees that all escapes shall be narrow, no more than the breadth of a hair"; "The best thing about time is the nick of it." This effect is used so relentlessly for Jackson's exploits that they lose their suspense completely and just become shticks.
Equally tired is the nobility of Danny Glover and his cloyingly upright daughter Thandie Newton. The inevitable, discreet romance that develops, with daddy dead and the world half saved, between Ms. Newton and the top US scientist, played with largely wasted dash by the talented Chiwetel Ejiofor: how wearying it is to watch this! George Segal and cohort Blu Mankum do saccharine turns as cruise ship musicians trying to reunite with estranged offspring via phone at the edge of doom. A doom that takes far too long to come, and is dragged out with underwater sequences stolen from Cameron's Titanic. Bad idea to remind us of a really good disaster movie!
The superstitious and paranoid (and above all naive) in the audience will also have much to cluck over when it comes to the plan to "save" a small part of the planet's population, and the way the elite's knowledge of what's coming is cunningly hidden from the masses of humanity. Isn't that just the way? Except that it's not, and if there were truth in any of this, it would have been all over the Internet. The parts of this movie that are hokiest and least able to survive scrutiny (though none of it survives that long) are those related to global knowledge of the impending disaster; who arrived at it, how it was dealt with, and what the timetable was.
But in all this tiresome nitpicking I've been bypassing the big fun for the audience, and in the view of some, the malicious delight of German-born Mr. Emmerich, in what Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy calls his "lip-smacking smorgasbord of global annihilation" -- the way we get to see California sink into the sea, the White House smashed by a giant Navy warship, Michelangelo's frescoes in the Vatican drop to earth as St. Peter's in Rome crumbles, the Eiffel Tower floated away, Rio's Christ the Redeemer statue disintegrated, and Las Vegas, Yellowstone Park, all of Tibet, exploded from below and turned into toast. Woody Harrelson, in a wild-eyed caricature of himself and draped in long fake beard and elaborate hair extensions, gets to go down in a kind of kitsch grandeur of a Gotterdammerung atop a peak in Yellowstone.
Well, yeah, wow! But without a believable plot or interesting characters, who cares? And frankly, no matter how good the CGI has become, an unbelievable event still looks unreal because I know it's not real. If 'Less is more,' then more is indubitably less; and more-and-more ultimately adds up to just that much less. It's the law of diminishing returns.