Now, about the 10 stars...

Rating: 10/10 (16 November 2009)

My Take: A big-budget guilty pleasure blockbuster with spectacular special effects. You get what you pay for.
You can keep your TRANSFORMERS 2, and I don't even need to see G.I. JOE and even TERMINATOR:SALVATION anymore. Roland Emmerich's latest end-of-the-world blockbuster 2012 is my favorite guilty pleasure blockbuster of year, perhaps even for a long time. It's been a long time ever since I saw an end-of-days disaster movie. And come opening day, I invited a date, lined up to get tickets, bought a two tubs of popcorn and my date and I were lucky enough to get two front row seats. Anyone going out to see a disaster movie by Roland Emmerich will know what to expect: A wholesale planet-wide demolition derby filled with several stock characters and some clichéd situations washed down a potpourri of impressive special effects, top thrills and an all-star cast. So why, you ask, do I think the movie deserves a 10 stars? Simple: It was fun. Great fun indeed. And at several occasions, pretty funny too. 2012 isn't just a disaster movie, it's every disaster movie ever made before rolled into one, and maybe multiplied to 10. Not only does the film tips its hat to every major disaster movie of yesteryear's, from THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, to EARTHQUAKE and WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE; It also references every disaster movie cliché in the book.
The plot is pure sci-fi hokum about solar flares slowly heating up the Earth's core, not too fortunately coinciding with the Mayan civilization's prophecy of the Apocalypse. Scientist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) warns the White House chief-of-staff (Oliver Platt) and even The President (Danny Glover) himself about the impending doom. But what every end-of-the-world disaster flick needs is that everyman character. That character is Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a failed writer-turned-limo driver who must try to save his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her new surgeon boyfriend (Tom McCarthy); as well as his their two kids (Liam James and Morgan Lily) from a crumbling California and possibly take them to China, where supposedly the government is building ships to carry enough people in case of the upcoming deluge. Keeping up with his tradition of a "small-end-of-the-world-after-all", the characters' fates are intertwined. Coincidence? I think not.
Wait, don't throw your stones at me just yet. 2012 does have its ridiculous moments, plenty of them in fact. The clichés are fairly obvious (Don't worry, dogs never have their bad days in any Emmerich movie). There's isn't a cliché in the genre that Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser didn't embrace. You'll probably laugh at these clichés, and yet you don't really laugh at them, but with them. But perhaps what really makes the show are the special effects. Emmerich reportedly informs that this would be his last doomsday epic, and he definitely goes all the way here; the effects are par excellence here. Cities are ravaged by multiple earthquakes and tsunamis, active volcanoes appear and shoot great balls of fire, and in typical Emmerich tradition: national monuments are blown up real good (most of them, you might have glimpsed at the trailer). The story may be pure pseudo-science, but the effects seem to make the catastrophe almost too real. In one instance, when St. Peter's Basilica gets a shaky tremor, I had to lean over my date and jokingly tell her that it was alright and it wasn't real.
2012 is spectacular fun, and "fun" is the key word here. The effects are truly marvelous, and unlike some of the other "great" CGI these days, I actually had the time to absorb and marvel at how awesome they are. And for a movie that's built entirely of spectacle, the actors are surprisingly capable and sometimes believable. It may not be what the critics call a great movie, but for sheer escapism, the movie gives the audience what they pay for and will no doubt rake a lot of money in the box office. By the time the credits roll, my date and I had a good time and that's all that matters. And that's my 10 stars there. Take it or leave it, I loved this movie.
Rating: ***** out of 5.