2012

There are many words that could be used to describe the end of the world; ‘boring’ and ‘inconsequential’ aren’t two of them. Too bad Roland Emmerich produced exactly that.

2012 is the latest in double entendre disaster films from the German filmmaker. He has previously directed crap like Stargate, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow, leaving many audiences frustrated by taking good if slightly bizarre concepts for popcorn films, and weighing them down with cliché characters, unintentionally funny dialogue, and moral messages delivered with the same subtlety as Seth MacFarlane masturbating in the middle of the street. Yet despite the critical disdain, his films still make a tonne of money. Roland Emmerich is the filmmaking equivalent of the rock band Creed.

Back to the film itself – it is an undisciplined, two and a half hour festival of pain where a million ideas are presented, none of them good. Every character gets their own pedestal at some point, even the President’s science advisor’s Dad’s best friend, just so their often-hilarious deaths don’t seem as pointless as they are. This clusterfuck means the most exciting action sequence unwittingly goes to the Russian billionaire’s Mastercard-faced girlfriend’s dog. No, really.

Then there are the pointless subplots, like the one involving the world’s artistic heritage. When the Mona Lisa is stored and placed in a different location than originally thought, a scientist is killed in an explosive car crash when he threatens to expose the truth. This is done through replicating Princess Diana’s death. Yes, they recreate the crash scene in the Port de l’Alma tunnel to energise a plot that’s never mentioned again after the CNN news anchor describes it as a ‘deadly’ car crash. Not a great idea to piss off readers of the Daily Express. Then again, they’ll see it anyway just because the words ‘Princess’ and ‘Diana’ are spoken consecutively.

The main story that revolves around John Cusack’s character is non-descript. Cusack is a prophetic science fiction writer who is NOT a vessel for Roland Emmerich in the same way M. Night Shyamalan played a prophetic writer in Lady In The Water. He and his family just run away from the apocalypse in the same way Jake Gasyjyettjth Donnie Darko literally ran away from the cold in The Day After Tomorrow. At no point are you tricked into thinking Cusack may actually die, even when great big digital trains are hurtling towards him. If anything, the only purpose of the character, and every other humanoid for that matter, is to string together sequences of surrealistic CGI imagery.

There’s the North Pole in Wisconsin, the USS Kennedy smashing into the White House and the President himself, a ship avoiding a head on collision with the top quarter of Mount Everest – all of which is rather boring to watch. There are only two ways you could possibly enjoy 2012: 1) you liked The Day After Tomorrow with its dramatic convenient wolves and want to see the same situation taken to the extreme, or 2) you loved how the drawings of robots kept on repeatedly hitting each other in Transformers 2.

So, in case you didn’t get the message in the first six paragraphs, avoid 2012 in the same way all politicians avoid the truth in Emmerich‘s canon of unquestionable fact. I would suggest watching something a bit more intelligent and world affirming, but technically The Jeremy Kyle Show lands in that category.