Wasted Opportunity for a More Powerful Message

Rating: 6/10 (19 November 2009)

2012 is just barely 3 years away, and this movie reminds us that Mayan, Chinese and Biblical sources all are telling us that year would bring with it the end of days as we know it.
The movie is big stuff. It looks expensive from the trailers alone. Watching the film itself though is another matter. This is already the third disaster movie by director Ronald Emmerich, after "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow" (unless you count "Eight Legged Freaks"). I do not really know how a film of this immense magnitude can give the feeling of being so shallow. There was a great potential for this movie to deliver a powerful message here. But unfortunately, we get a cartoon-like movie with the most corny and downright cheesy scenes and dialog.
Don't get me wrong, there are several edifying and unprecedented images like that of the White House being destroyed by an runaway aircraft carrier, or that of flooding in the Himalayas. But scenes like those when John Cusack was driving his limo through falling buildings from Pasadena to Sta. Monica Airport, or his getting out alive from a camper swallowed up by the gaping earth at Yellowstone are too ridiculously over-the-top to be any good. Definitely one close call too many.
As for the characters, they are too one-dimensional and too unbelievably super-human to care about. The wild character of Woody Harrelson was too nutty to be likable. In truth, I only liked the geologist Adrian Helmsley (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), his Indian geologist friend and the family of the Tibetan monk. They had scenes of genuine pathos amidst the chaos.