"2012" Chiwetel Ejiofor, John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Woody Harrelson
Ed Augusts
of the plot. I'm working on the knack to keep from doing that, but
haven't perfected it yet!)
The Actors
Let me first say: I didn't much respect John Cusack as the broken-
marriage "Atlantis" author who has a day job chauffeuring around the
brats of a Russian billionaire. He seems to have top billing in this
movie; that billing should rightfully go to Chiwetel Ejiofor as black
scientist Adrian Helmsley. Right up there should be Woody Harrelson as
homespun nutcase, Charlie Frost. Oliver Platt is just plain
dislikable as Science Advisor, Carl Anheuser. Sometimes you just
dislike the character so much, you hate the actor for having had to
play him. Amanda Peet as Kate Curtis, John Cusack's movie wife, is not
particularly outstanding, as all her lines are predicated upon the
circumstances. She is a loving, concerned mom, in the midst of a
difficult choice about which of two men to love and live with, but we
never really get to see her shine. The two kids are a lot of fun,
played by Liam James and Morgan Lily. Danny Glover has to play such a
defeated role as being the U.S. President presiding over the the end
of the world, that he is too sad to ever enjoy in this movie. Zlatko
Buric as Yuri Karpov (sounds like a chess champion), is outstanding as
a gruff, selfish-seeming Russian billionaire, though why he has a
transport plane filled with new sports cars for an auto show is
anybody's guess since he's really in town to see a fight at Caesar's
Palace. I could go on with a dozen more actors. But I diverge from
my appointed task...
I've seen "2012" on the big screen here in Tucson, twice in 3 days.
The first time, I was engulfed by the story and quite impressed with
it. Upon re-visiting "2012" however, I could take the time to enjoy
the 'over the top" spectaculars as well as the "send-ups" the movie
features, and am now asking some questions about some points that
vaguely disturb me. In many places, I realized the script writers
were using little more than stock scenes from disaster movies that
we'd seen before, just ratcheting them up to make them "ultra-
shocking". I could give you probably a dozen examples, at least, of
"Been there! Done that!" film-making in "2012". But I won't inflict
nearly that many examples upon you...
Sweating Third-Worlders at the Bottom of a Mine Shaft
Haven't we seen going down, down, down in a mineshaft elevator again &
again in movies? This always precedes something BAD that's going to
happen soon....Innovative here, were: Buckets of ice water to keep
their feet cold, so they could function in 120 degree heat. That was a
bizarre touch!. That the neutrinos were acting-up was fine, the
science behind THAT was fairly interesting, (i.e., the Sun's rays
starting to microwave the interior of our planet!), but, already 2
miles down an elevator shaft, we are shown a tank of water that
extends even more "thousands of feet" even deeper into the earth,
which is starting to boil-over with heat. Why would anyone have sunk
such a reservoir of water deep in a an old copper mine, anyway? This
isn't "Forbidden Planet", these are not mines excavated by the Krell,
so why have a hugely deep reservoir whose surface is 2 miles
underground? As for subterranean heat, that's not a surprise, is
it? if you go down into the crust of the earth deep enough anywhere,
you get this same effect. The "Geysers" area in Northern California,
is just such a one, as well as Mammoth and the Yellowstone caldera,
the last of which was shown in the movie, but it could have been
either of the others, instead. Hot magma lies just under the crust in
all 3 locations.
The Old Coot / Conspiracy Theorist
The old coot / conspiracy theorist / mountain man, who files a map of
the location of the ships between "Roswell and... Marilyn Monroe" is
'waay over the top,. as a happy-go-lucky nutjob eager to be there in
person, as chuckle-happy as all get out that something massive is
going to explode right in his kisser. In the movie, everyone who was
going to go public about the forthcoming disaster was eliminated by
some sinister arm of a (world?) government, but the nut-job going on
24/7 about it on his own little radio station, not only survives any
government sanctions, but doesn't get bothered by anyone at all.
Maybe because his personal little disaster movies are so dumb, nobody
would ever believe him.
The Numbers Just Don't Add Up...
The survivalist's little movie says that this particular deadly
alignment of the Solar System with the Center of the Galaxy occurs
only once in 64,000 years. Or maybe it was 640,000 years. I should
have taken notes. A Tyrannosaurus pops-up at that point, indicating
this time interval has something to do with the death of the
dinosaurs. Sure, but that was 65 million years ago, not 64 thousand or
640 thousand. So, between the death of the dinosaurs and us today,
there have been more than one thousand 64,000 year periods, and one
hundred 640,000 year periods, and nothing thoroughly cataclysmic ever
happened during any of them. So the supposed science they're using,
the chronology at least, is nonsense.
The Yellowstone Caldera
The explosion of the Yellowstone caldera is actually quite believable
to someone who's studied the facts about what's under there. In the
movie it's damn-near nuclear, but the family's get-away ride in a
recreational vehicle from the ash and debris cloud is kind of silly...
The roiling cloud ought to be moving about 500 miles per hour,
nothing, especially a man and a child in a recreation vehicle with the
back end burnt to a crisp, should be able to escape it, but of course
they do. And the planes this family get into go from zero to 85
knots in a matter of seconds. The super-quick take-off of the big
Soviet-era transport plane, literally diving into a chasm, is even
less likely. The desperate aircraft controller in his tower, shouting
"You're not cleared for take off! You're not cleared to go!" as the
rolling cloud smashes into the tower and silences him, is kind of
funny, it reminds me of something out of one of the "Airplane!"
movies.
Not-So Miscellaneous Points .
The kitchen scene on the cruise ship takes place in the largest cruise
ship kitchen in the world -- it appears to be as large as a football
field. Cooks holding on to food carts, as the room slowly turns over
onto its side brings back the most intense scenes of "The Poseidon
Adventure", and several other boat sinkings and capsizings.
Heading the plane between buildings that are collapsing with
unimaginable slowness, reminds us of the scene in "Independence Day"
when two airmen in a captured small alien spacecraft diagonally slide
through a closing aperture... But in this movie, planes and cars --
so long as they are carrying our family of survivors -- routinely
dodge dozens of crashing overpasses, collapsing garages, teetering
towers, Las Vegas' mini-Eiffel Tower, even a huge rolling "Donut"
sign. it must have been a lot of fun to conceive of all these
simulations.
The tsunamis hitting the East Coast are very reminiscent of
Spielberg's "Deep Impact".(1998). The inclusion of the Aircraft
Carrier John F. Kennedy was a little over-the-top, though, wasn't it?
The Captain of the vessel the Americans board, has a uniform bigger
than he is. He looks to be overstuffed with his own credentials. He
strangely reminds us of the generals aboard the Death Star in "Star
Wars".
By the time the water was rising in the ship's compartments and
another perilous scramble for survival was on --- reminiscent of every
underwater survival scene I've ever watched -- starting with "Sea
Hunt" starring Lloyd Bridges in the 1960's, I was ready to go home!
I'd HAD IT with one kind of disaster survival after another, after
another. By the time the Russian transport plane hit the endless,
endless flat glacier --- and yet another unlikely escape was in the
makings -- and another pilot was going down, down, down in his ship,
er, plane. (reminding me as it fell of the truck in the nerve-
wracking 1953 film "The Wages of Fear"...I was ready to shoot the
survivors myself.
Faulty Earthquake Magnitudes
I noticed more attention should have been paid to what real earthquake
magnitudes are. You'd think someday a film company that is spending
tens of millions of dollars to make a movie, would hire a seismologist
from Cal Tech or Berkeley or Golden, Colorado, as an advisor to ensure
that we get accurate descriptions of earthquakes. I could believe
that Manhattan Beach, California, was hit by a 10.9, a thousand times
more severe than the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December,
2004, because there was nothing left of L.A. after the quake, whole
sheets of landmass sank into the sea. But earthquakes of 8.2 and 7.9,
I believe, in the waters off Japan, were credited with generating a
tsunami that overtopped and capsized a massive cruise ship, and that
would have happened in real life, not even from the 9.0 of 2004.
Quakes in the mid-8's might generate a sea wave a few feet tall, at
most.
Bad Overlay with the Actual President
Another problem with the story has to do with the actual years, 2009,
2010, 2011 and 2012. The story shows a black president in the White
House, an old black president (played by Danny Glover), who has very
little if any resemblance to Barack Obama. Yet the story takes place
during the years when Obama is actually the president. So there is
something weird about that. It would have made better sense if the
movie had come out a few years earlier than it did, so it wouldn't
have to create an "alternate history" altogether, showing presidents
that don't exist now in our real world as if they were real. It
hearkens the possibility of an Alternate Reality altogether, i.e., a
planet somewhere out there where dinosaurs died out 64,000 years ago,
and Barack Obama did not get elected president in 2008. Her's a
curious mild coincidence, not up to the level of Nostradamus,
however: In the twelve year old movie "Deep Impact", black star
Morgan Freeman plays President Beck of the United States. The "B-c-k"
is reminiscent of B-ara-C-K (Obama). Only the "e" is out of place.
Only I would have noticed something as trivial as that!
Ethnic, Religious, Racial & Nationalistic Questions
The final problem is ethnic, racial, religious, and nationalistic, and
the film's depiction of the survivors and the doomed is a bit
suspicious. So the gruff Russian billionaire is obviously 'dead
meat', he's not going to survive, and we're made to feel its almost
too bad his two gluttonous mean-spirited long-haired boys may make it
out of the movie alive.. But the good Indian scientist who "puts
together the dots" doesn't get "picked up" and he and his family die,
as well. The cruise ship's elderly passenger's call to his son's
mixed Japanese family ends in disaster for both. The black American
president is truly snake-bit, and his sadness and helplessness is a
big downer, the more so because we have a black president in our
country right this minute. Ours at least smiles and has more hope to
offer than the one facing apocalypse in the flick.
The Rinpoche, a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas, doesn't fare any
better than the Pope, and the Pope and his crowd are given short-
shrift in this movie: After a crack appears in the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel, between the fingers of God and Adam, it seems maybe
the film is saying God is Dead, or God has suddenly given up on
mankind. The sight of all those people in and around the Vatican
ending-up with the Dome of St. Peters' rolling over them was a little
depressing. The common man and woman prayed and waved placards, but
the only ones who survived this disaster were the super-rich, and
those selected for "genetic" reasons, whatever that means, to help re-
populate the earth. There is NO lottery, the ones who survive are a
400,000-odd hand-selected or money-financed distinct minority, the
number of survivors echoing something in the Bible to that effect.
400,000 is less than about 1 in every 10,000 people on the planet.
The Chinese get a lot of credit -- only they -- it seems -- could have
built the ships in the necessary amount of time. And the land
mentioned at the end --- the southern portion of Africa? What a
strange place for the story-writers to pick.. So, the survivors are
going to go back to where the first humans were thought to have come
down out of the trees, millions of years ago, and start again from the
same place they began, last time! I think of that one family -- a
mom, her boy, her girl, and the estranged husband whom she left for
another -- and wonder -- WHY did we follow THEM during this movie? Is
there anything so very special about them that makes them qualified to
survive when so many others die? There is nothing special about them
at all, they are just like you and me and our friends. If we are
Caucasian, urban, middle class, California, at least! And a nuclear,
heterosexual family, at that! I guess that's what makes them of
special interest to those with the average demographics who would
spend money to see a super-catastrophic movie like this where one
nuclear white family, a broken black family, and bits and pieces of
other families, including Queen Elizabeth with her two dogs, by the
way, seen briefly, survive unscathed -----Ed Augusts