Worth Seeing For the F/X, But Check Your Brain At The Door

Rating: 7/10 (13 November 2009)

I remember sitting in a theater in 1996 waiting for the film "Independence Day" to begin. Two hours later, I emerged as a teenager wowed by the special effects and the incredible likability of the emerging Will Smith. Over the past summer, I just happened to catch it on TV and an interesting thing happened. Maybe it was my age, but aside from some of the groundbreaking visuals, the story came through to me as an adult as very disjointed and utterly implausible.
Skip forward to 2009. As I left the 2.5 hour extravaganza known as "2012", I felt conflicted. As a teenager, I may have been able to just take in the visual spectacle of LA being destroyed or Yellowstone Park exploding into fiery magma. But the adult in me was constantly distracted by the jumps in the script and the superficial characters on screen. As I look back at the film history of Roland Emmerich, it's impossible not to see his main male characters as utterly disposable. Unknown Will Smith? Check. Matthew Broderick? Check. Dennis Quaid? Check. John Cusack? Check. Take any of them (well, maybe not Smith today) and you could just rotate them out through Emmerich's films. It makes the film feel oddly generic even when you see destruction on an immense scale.
And man, is the destruction immense. Take every disaster movie the past 30 years and just toss them in the trash. The visuals are spectacular. There is this one moment in the film (you will know it when you see it) where one of the main characters survives despite a nearly 100% chance they shouldn't given the situation. And that is where the ultimate problems is with the film: Big bangs with little to no plausibility.
The Good: Chiwetel Ejiofor is incredible given the material and definitely brings some credibility to the film. He's the strongest of the characters and ultimately the one we the audience trust the most. Oh yeah, the special effects are pretty good too.
The Bad: Pacing issues abound as the world is pretty much destroyed in the first half of the film and the characters are left to deal with the government's Ark project.
The Ugly: Script.
7/10 (Almost a 6, but the visuals outweigh the flaws)
My Rating System:
10 - Classic Film. One that will be remembered long after I'm dead. 9 - Great Film. One of the best of a given year. 8 - Above Average Film. Minor flaws and in the Top 50 of a given year. 7 - Good Film. Flawed film just above average with something "special". Top 150 of a given year. 6 - Average Film. Most films fall here. 5 - Below Average Film. Sub-par. 4 - Very Below Average Film. 3 - Poor Film. 2 - Shouldn't Have Been Made Film. 1 - Unwatchable Film. Burn it.