Good movie watered down by some strategic mistakes

Rating: 8/10 (7 December 2009)

Overall, great, I'll give it an 8. It's certainly worth watching. Sadly a few strategic mistakes on the part of the director and writer watered the movie down.
The destruction scenes are awe-inspiring. I actually got goose-bumps watching some of it, a first for this 50 year old viewer. The scope, complexity, imagination, and excellence. I'm an expert viewer but to me it looked really realistic, I didn't see anything I could recognize as computer animation even though I know that's mostly what it was. Had I been the producer and the creative team came to me with a plan for what they wanted to do I would have thrown them out of my office: "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? Stop wasting time and put something down that we actually have a chance of completing in less than 10 years." Also at least one of the destruction scenes (the one were they drove through a sky-scraper) featured various sight-gags and funny content that I enjoyed and laughed out loud. However this came at the expense of lightening the tone of a scene in which thousands of people are supposedly dying.
The soundtrack was awesomely detailed, at least at first. During the scene were Cusack showed up at his ex-wife's house and then an earthquake hit, there were all sorts of interesting sounds happening and they sounded good and clear. One neat sound was timber creaking as the house gave way. In later scenes I did not notice that detail.
A surprise was the many big stars. Danny Glover, John Cusack (with less and even no (!) guy-liner this time), Oliver Platt, and Woody Harrelson.
Woody Harrelson's character provided the comic relief and it was good. It came across well and also funny, but they avoided the mistake of making him annoying or too silly, also he moved the plot along. It was good but it could have been funnier. It would not have been as much fun with an unknown actor, so Woody carried the character more than the dialog.
The drama was good but not good enough so that this movie could have ever made it to 10 status. A little trite and pedantic during the speech section near the end.
No, I repeat NO Mayan content. Only a brief mention and one watermarked shot of the Mayan city of Tikal. They mangled the word "Quiché." It's pronounced key-TCHAY (like touché but it's a hard ch like tch, not a soft one like sh), they pronounced it "quiche" as in "I'll have the quiche Lorraine, please." That was unbelievable. They also mispronounced Tikal, which is pronounced Tee-KAHL. I forget what they said but it was something ridiculous like "tickle." Anyway it doesn't matter because other than that one line of dialog you could watch the entire movie and never realize that Mayans were involved. I think this was an odd and poor choice. Other movies like "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Star Gate," "The Da Vinci Code," and "National Treasure" make good drama with quasi-factual archaeological content. In this case there was some real and really interesting factual content on which to draw but they passed. The movie would have been a large notch more worthwhile had they thrown in some tidbits. A little hieroglyphics here, a little pyramid skulking there, a few fascinating facts about "El Gran Jaguar" (the main pyramid in Tikal) or "El Mirador" (possibly the world's largest pyramid, located in Northern Guatemala), it could have been done without bogging the movie down.
The tone was too light. I mean the world is ending, millions of people are dying, but the overall tone was light and a little upbeat, focusing on the few that were making it out alive. In particular, the scenes in the plane were way too light, especially Cusack's ex-wife. They would just barley make it out with their lives with the world crumbling right beneath them and entire cities sinking into the ocean, and then once air-born she would look up almost smiling and just go on with her dialog like nothing had happened. It was almost like "Oh wow, I'm glad that's over. We made it! Is my hair mussed? Oh well, what's next? Is it lunch time yet?" For me those lines were so misplaced that it was a distraction.
The biggest strategic mistake of the director was evenly spacing the action out over the entire movie. It was like drama-action-drama-action-drama-action. The voltage varied constantly throughout from high voltage action back to low-voltage talking heads. The early action scenes had major impact on me, later ones had a "more-of-the-same" effect and my reaction was "Oh, we have to do more action now? Ho-hum, OK, let's get it over with." The movie would have been much better if they had adopted a more conventional pacing, put most of the drama and character development up front, then launch into the action and continually build to the climax. Had they done it this way the movie might have been a 9, but without a better dramatic story it still would not have been a 10.
Larry Brown