2012 – an epic disaster of a movie
I used to worship Roland Emmerich; I still do to a certain extent. Of course I’ve been laughed at every time I’ve mentioned this fact in cultural studies classes and that Independence Day is one of my favourite films and is the one that really made me consider filmmaking as a viable career path (no matter how deluded that notion is now).
Emmerich has made some cult masterpieces of genre filmmaking, Universal Soldier, Stargate, the fore mentioned ID4, but ID4 was his magnum opus, it started the entire genre of end of the world blockbuster epics and it will be the film that has and will define his entire career.
It was also the last good film he ever made…unless you count The Patriot as a good film. I haven’t seen it in it’s entirety so I can’t judge but that film was an anomaly amongst The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC and not to mention Godzilla (which I personally thought was the death of his career)
Did 2012 fail like all his other films since 1996? Yup, even though David and Margaret were highly generous and gave it 3.5 stars, 2012 was just another film which drowned narcissistically in its love for VFX.
I can forgive bad writing and a ridiculous plot, elements which form the basis of a disaster blockbuster. But the problem here was the lack of charismatic actors or characters even to carry the bad writing and plot. The 3rd rate cast with the likes of Danny Glover just leave me cold, cold like the frickin’ Antarctic tundra.
Add to the mix, horrible camerawork and cinematography (shit what cinematography anyway, everything was green screened to death) and a forgettable score (David Arnold where were you?) you end up with a general mess of a film. And with a running time of 158min, a much too long mess of a film which became a highly uncomfortable experience for my bladder.
So what was I expecting? I haven’t seen The Day After Tomorrow or 10,000BC so I had no idea how badly Emmerich had lost his mojo. I wanted some sort of tie in to Mayan mythology rather than the blunt objective driven mantra of: “oh man, how much of the earth can be destroy and how many people we can kill?”
In the end the main reason 2012 failed was that as a result of the culmination of all its points of failure, we as an audience just couldn’t connect, not to the characters, not to the situations, nothing, nada. It’s like watching paint dry with a really awesome subwoofer mix.
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I was lucky enough to get in on the Sydney premiere which meant I enjoyed the screening surrounded by a lot of movie critics (including Margaret & David), and an occasional C-list TV celeb. It reminded me of the time when I actually really wanted to be a film reviewer. I still think it’s a pretty awesome job, and you don’t have to pay to see trash like 2012.
