Sick stuff

Rating: 3/10 (3 November 2010)

This is no award-winning movie, with strengths in acting or story or the like. It's essentially the latest "stuff blowing up" movie by Roland Emmerich, who makes these movies regularly, for money.
However, something about this movie makes it stand out particularly dreadfully from most others of the same genre. The introductory sequence of LA breaking apart is full of shots of people in cars as their cars are destroyed, people being killed as stuff knocks them around, and shots of huge skyscrapers crumbling and tumbling, and quick shots of people inside the wreckage, clinging to things helplessly.
It's almost impossible for me to watch. It's too traumatizing, too sickening, and cannot be properly tempered by the fact that it's all just CGI fiction. The fact is, the shots of people bear a far too striking resemblance to the scenes from September 11th 2001, where we saw people jumping out of the towers to their inevitable deaths.
But enough of that. On the brighter side, as I've noticed with "10,000 BC", Roland Emmerich is very good with broader story lines, and very bad with smaller story lines involving individual people. The concept of the Arks and everything after the initial "stuff blowing up" parts are decent enough, but the individual characters are one-dimensional archetypes you've seen in pretty much all his movies and others.
Oliver Platt's character is the stereotypical "bad guy" because he's the voice of reason, taken to the extreme of cold logic and rationality at the expense of human lives---the Superego. He justifies the fact that the majority of those being saved in the Arks are the very rich, because without their money supporting it, the project would never have gotten started. There's Chiwetel Ejiofor's character, the opposite of him, the Id, who mopes constantly and contradicts the "bad guy" with emotion and humanity. There's the bumbling fat foreign guy and his trophy wife, whom he betrays and leaves for dead, only to be betrayed in turn by her later on. There's the dorky science guy, played in the exact same vein as Dr. Phlox from Star Trek Enterprise (obviously it's the same actor) by John Billingsley Amazingly (for a movie like this) there are inklings of contradictions in some characters---tendencies for them to act outside of their archetypes, but these are few and far between. Speaking of which, plenty of dialogue is stupid and cliché'd, like "who would have thought the crazies with the cardboard signs would be right?" and the scenes not involving the Arks or the "stuff blowing up" is largely boring and filler.
Amazingly again, just a few superficial changes, particularly involving characterization, would have made this movie uniquely different from others of the same genre, and probably worth 3 or 4 stars out of 5. But it's not, and it doesn't.