2012: Immediate Reaction

Rating: 6/10 (16 November 2009)

2012 is a story about the 'end of the world' and is inevitably going to get compared to The Day After Tomorrow (2004), another story about the end of the world, or something similar, directed by the same Roland Emmerich. With better spectacle, a better cast and a (slightly) better story 2012 compares very favorably with The Day After Tomorrow - though as much through that film's failings as through it's own strengths. Independence Day (1996) remains Emmerich's best film - and probably THE best film - about the end of the world so far.
Because the limp and soggy backbone of The Day After Tomorrow was formed by two of the dullest and most nondescript actors I can think of - Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal (aptly playing father and son) - audiences struggled to care about anybody in that film. They and everyone else in the film were as uncharismatic and tedious as real life people - and this is not what we go to the movies for. The final straw in that film's coffin was its deadly serious tone. It was a grisly experience that I wouldn't want ever to have to sit through again.
That was what I was a bit worried about going into 2012. I didn't want to see a similarly bad version of that film. And though 2012 is better in every way it still doesn't quite come recommended. The cast is a great deal better: John Cusack plays a sympathetic father, looks as young as he always did and (of course) wears sunglasses like always; Danny Glover is unintentionally hilarious as the President, slurring and lisping and presumably dribbling all over his shoes. The two young kids who, in this kind of film could easily be so bad you spend the running time wishing they would die but knowing they won't, surprisingly, are fine and I was fine with them not dying. Best of all are Oliver Platt (as the Cynical Government Man), Chiwetel Ejiofor (the Earnest Scientist) and Woody Harrelson (the Not-So Crazy After All Conspiracy Theorist). Of course these characters are two-dimensional archetypes; the casting however is spot on and each of them puts in good work, relishing the clanging lines they've been given and clearly relishing their meaty, bombastic monologues. Also, there's a good helping of farcical humor to go with all the meticulous destruction and grandstanding melodrama. This seems odd at first though becomes extremely welcome towards the end as the story inevitably goes to pot and as the anticlimactic climax stomps slowly out of the future towards the present.
The biggest set-piece and the clearest evidence of this film's quarter billion dollar price-tag comes about a third through, lasts for absolutely AGES and, does not bore. Cusack manages to escape the tectonic silliness that Los Angeles has suddenly become with his estranged family and rival dad first in a limo, then a small plane. The action is staged in such a way that's dizzying because the shifting background in the long-lens shots denies you the sense of real-world context you'd normally have. The earth itself has become kinetic in a way I hadn't seen displayed like this before. Happily a short while afterward the story requires yet ANOTHER plane journey, this time in the biggest plane in the world ("It's Russian!"), and one filled with the most expensive cars in the world... for no real reason at all.
Up to the last 50 minutes or so the film manages to maintain interest but after they get to where they were heading the story turns very quickly to sh.t because everything has literally come to a halt. The only thing driving this bloody-minded, thick-skulled mammoth of a movie was its urgent sense of having to get somewhere, of needing to escape this, that or the other. It all gets very and claustrophobic, Poseidon Adventure style and... that's it. The last forty-fifty minutes is as boring as The Day After Tomorrow but with slightly better acting. The supposed tension here comes not from a city collapsing underneath your plane that might not be going fast enough to get the lift it needs for you not to die but - stupidly and boringly - from some guy (who you definitely don't care about since he only just got introduced) with his leg trapped down a well somewhere. This is pretty much the point from which you can tell that the very end, when it comes, will probably be as boring if not more so.