KEEP YR SCIENCE OUT OF MY MOVIES

[defrog]

So I saw 2012 over the weekend.

Is it bad to say that the bridal unit and I cackled like maniacs during all the mass-desctruction bits?

Whether it is or isn’t, there’s probably no better way to describe it. Roland Emmerich is pretty much resigned to being the new Irwin Allen, which means any other element in the film – actors, dialogue, storyline, whatever – serves as an excuse to sink California into the ocean, blow up Yellowstone Park and have a tsunami toss the USS John F Kennedy onto the White House. Which is all people are paying to see anyway.

So no, I can’t take it seriously. Which is also why, despite my interest in science, I don’t much care about the scientific inaccuracies. For one thing, I’m a fan of both Star Wars and Art Bell, so it’s not like I can point fingers.

Also, if yr going to pretend that the conspiracy theorists were right about the Mayans (on a technicality), you might as well pretend that crustal displacement can be caused by solar flares overheating the Earth’s core and that Charles Hapgood was right about pole shifting.

That said, 2012 is pretty flawed even for a disaster epic. Aside from the usual plot holes and cheesiness, it's way too long. They could easily have cut a good 30 minutes off the film without losing a single action scene. Also, for all my disinterest in the scientific implausibilities, this is one movie that could have benefitted from leaving the science out completely. The idea of global apocalypse – especially one predicted by superstitious fearmongering – is, for my money, scarier when there’s no apparent reason for it happening.

On the plus side, the explodey bits are great fun and mostly well done, and it helps to have John Cusack (who I generally like to watch) as the bewildered centerpiece for most of the film. But for all that, The Day After Tomorrow (pseudoscience hokum and all) was a better version of this sort of thing.

Masters of disaster,

This is dF

Comments

[dferguson.livejournal.com]

http://www.pulpworkpress.com/moviereviewnotebook.htm

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

I was going to ask for that URL, actually. And I swear I didn't see yr review before raising the Irwin Allen reference. :)

The other thing I'd add regarding caring about who lives and who dies is that both the bride and I predicted with uncanny accuracy pretty much all the survivors in advance. So there's really no suspense anyway. It also illustrates fairly accurately how close Emmerich sticks to his own formula.

I agree about Cusack too. He can make almost any film worth watching, for my money.

[dferguson.livejournal.com]

I think that anybody who grew up during the Great Disaster Movie Era would easily make the Irwin Allen connection to 2012. This is an Irwin Allen movie amped up to the max. But take a movie like "The Poseidon Adventure" where each and every death was unexpected and shocking (especially the last two) and put it up against the deaths in 2012 where you could see them coming from a mile away and the differences are glaring.