Wonderfully preposterous

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2010)

I always find it amusing when people get angry with movies like 2012, saying they are an "insult to human intelligence" and so on. I guess 2012 really would be an insult to human intelligence if it had anything to do with human intelligence. It has not. To say that Roland Emmerich is the kind of director more interested in going for the direct visual impact is quite an understatement. Kind of like saying Michael Moore is a bit of a political film maker.
2012 is a good Emmerich movie, a good disaster movie and a good piece of junk food cinema. There's nothing - I mean NOTHING - here for anyone interested in character development, realism or any other kind of adequate storytelling devices. I think this is pretty much the reason it works fairly well. It all boils down to keeping it simple. The more ridiculous and huge your disaster is, the less you can risk messing around with it. The world ends, lets keep it at that. The problem with some of Emmerich's previous movies were that they fell on their own weight - The Day After Tomorrow was preposterous, yet tried to carry some kind of environmental message, and Godzilla was moronic but would probably have been more acceptable with a more charismatic monster (not named Godzilla!).
In 2012, nothing is in the way for the simplistic entertainment value. The simple beauty of it can be found, for instance, in a scene featuring Danny Glover as the US Preisdent actually presenting the news to the rest of the world's leaders, by simply saying "The world, as we know it, will soon come to an end." WHOAH! That's quite something. It's a wonder nobody gets the impression he has lost his mind.
No, it's not realistic. Yes, it's silly beyond belief. But it doesn't insult your intelligence, because I believe the movie trusts it's audience to be clever enough not to take it all that seriously. It's not like Transformers 2, which was a fantasy movie that actually was in need of some kind of consistency but just decided it wasn't important, and Emmerich is Bergman in comparison to Michael Bay anyway. In 2012 we actually get at least 30 minutes of tension building and we actually get Actors as our cardboard characters. Nothing in the movie is plausible, but it does make (it's own) sense. It's odd to me that anyone would look at the premise of 2012 - mind you, this is a story of The Mayan Apocalypse! - and not see that it's impossible to make this movie without humor and self-irony. Good character development has nothing to do with a movie like this. In fact, I dare say it would just bog it down. In a movie where the world ends at a specific date in 2012, an actor like John Cusack is certainly more than enough.
So we have a movie that works despite it's lack of any real conventional quality, since it's a campy roller coaster and that's really it. Does that mean it's a GOOD movie? Not really. Call me a snob, but under the circumstances these movies operate under I can't see how they would ever be properly good. On a star rating, I'm giving 2012 six out of ten. Giving it more would indeed be an insult to human intelligence.