2012: Roland Emmerich is in a league of his own

Rating: 10/10 (29 December 2009)

I feel more confused about this movie after having watched it than I did when I watched its trailer. This is one of those films thats so bad its actually good.
Roland Emmerich's uniquely special character as a director shines forth in 2012. The man and his films just have a special quality to them that are extremely difficult to pin down and doubly so when any attempt is made to judge Emmerich and his films' merits against other films in the same genres. Emmerich truly out-did himself 2012, and thats saying something if you are familiar with Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow.
Somehow, in 2012 Roland Emmerich has become SO completely vintage Roland Emmerich that I can only assume the man has ascended to a spiritual stratosphere beyond Nirvana, kept peerage with other noble souls such as Oliver Stone and Michael Moore. But even then, I highly doubt that after 2012 any film director will occupy the same league Roland Emmerich.
Only after explaining the directing brains behind this film can I feel even remotely safe to touch 2012.
2012 began innocently enough that, sitting with my girlfriend in the theater, I felt sure I was going to be treated to an apocalyptic masterpiece that would be a little Independence Day rolled in with Day After Tomorrow with a touch of conspiratorial End of the World rhetoric. When the guided tour of the planetary alignment continued a tad longer than I had expected, I half expected the aliens from Independence Day to come cruising back to finish off a middle aged Will Smith. All bets were off the moment this didn't happen, because at least space aliens could have lent some plausibility to the rest of the film.
Despite all scientific plausibility, the Sun somehow releases enough neutrinos to microwave the Earth's core and break up the Earth's crust. Obviously the world's governments keep a tight leash on information and no one knows, save our lovable heroes and villains, symbolized by various races and countries.
From that vantage point onward suspend all known laws of physics and human nature itself. The earth's crust is cracking apart at an alarming rate, governments are in a secret conspiracy to save the rich from imminent desctruction, everyone is scared and alarmed, and despite it all, no revolutions or demagogic figures such as a Hitler or Lenin appear to woo the masses. There are no major armed struggles. People in fact just passively protest as the ground literally melts beneath them. But thats just the good stuff.
Massive earthquakes aside, the attempt is made throughout the film to humanize and develop the major characters of the film that still boggles my mind. The main actress in the film, a divorced mother of two, has eeked out a pretty comfortable upper middle class life with a serious new lover in an up and coming doctor out on the southern coast of California. We are meant to be drawn into the humanity of these two characters as, no joke, a gigantic rift the size of a small canyon opens deep enough to lead straight into the molten mantle of the earth while they are SHOPPING at a grocery store. Then to not skip a beat, just a scene later, the same couple is apparently not traumatized by it all as the former husband/down and out author comes to warn them about impending doom. I don't know. If I had simply been shopping and a canyon formed at the local Jewel/Osco, I'd be pretty shaken about it, and certainly, a crazy man spouting crazy ideas wouldn't really seem to out of bounds for me at that point, but not in this movie. Such earthquakes persist rapid succession, and the doctor/lover remained so skeptical I wanted to punch him. L.A. is only being sunk into a pit of lava and you can't for a moment get off yourself? Scenes like that occurred in such frequency in this movie I can't even touch on them all. That alone would have been enough for Emmerich to maintain his aura if not for some of the other ridiculous scenes. All of Yellowstone national park goes up in a volcanic explosion, and a yuppy doctor just happens to 'know' how to fly a plane, and just happens to find the keys to the plane just few feet away from him on the runaway, then somehow manages to outrun a supersonic shockwave in a little 2 engined propeller airplane (which miraculously had fuel).
I could go on. Whole continents just happen to shift in such a way that it saves our heroes from having to make a water landing. Africa somehow escapes the end of the world unscathed (from Roland Emmerich, go figure). Characters we assume are good and even lovable turn out to be dicks in the end. The new Dali Lama just happens to be cruising through Tibet at just the right time to pick up a few stranglers from a plane wreck thats also just a stone's throw away from massive seaships that are for all intents and purposes floating cruiseships with zoos. But it all has a happy ending, because Africa is unscathed and we can all settle there, and begin anew. Need I mention that at this point all of civilization has been utterly wiped out? Wouldn't it be realistic to think men with bad intentions wouldn't want to seize power at that point? Why not, its pure anarchy, there are no governments left after all.
If you want to be treated to a movie where the Chinese are characteristically dictatorial, the Russians save the day, where the only continent left intact also happens to be the continent never once filmed in depth in the movie, and where the rich characteristically save themselves while everyone else dies, then see the movie. Really, its not as bad as it sounds.