2012 review: can’t you see the signs?

In some alternate la-la universe in which religions are all true, physics are optional, and your average B-grade writer can hold his breath for up to five minutes, the world is being bombarded by particles that don’t really exist (caused by a planetary alignment disrupting the sun’s activities, natch), leading to tectonic plates dancing around and causing the world as we know it to become engulfed in gorgeous fire and / or water effects. Why did I not hate this movie?

We get a quickly-sketched tapestry of people of different walks of life from all over the globe going about their daily lives that concludes just before the shit hits the fan, and then it’s typical landmark-destruction people-outrunning-tsunamis nonsense from here on out. But somewhere along the way, the disparate characters are joined together by flimsy plot threads, and as they all begin to realise that, hey, the world is going to end, we get a smattering of heartfelt phone calls to relatives (followed immediately by tidal waves, earthquakes, super-volcanoes, John Cusack emoting, etc.) and some pretty evocative ideas as well–if the world were really going to end, and we could only save 1% of the world’s population, how would we choose? Lottery? Tests? Monetary worth?

Unfortunately for the future of the human race, the governments responsible for building the ’arks’ to save humanity opt to sell seats for, oh, one billion euro, immediately discounting the vast majority of people from even considering saving themselves or their families. So the government decides not to tell anyone who can’t afford the trip. This is unnecessarily evil and a distracting plot hole, until it’s dealt with deep into the third act, which, in a 150-minute film, is far too late to deal with such gaping leaps in logic.

You might well roll your eyes at the man-miraculously-discovers-conspiracy-and-convinces-his-family-to-outrun-destruction-with-him cliché employed in the film, but in a movie where nearly seven billion people die, and odds of survival are roughly, say, one in a billion, it’s likely that someone will make it out alive, and this movie just chooses the ones in a billion that do make it. If everyone fights as hard as John Cusack does to save their family, and 99.99% of them fail, there’s still the 0.01% that succeed, and that’s who Cusack represents. Thanks to a few lucky connections, the ability to hold his breath for superhuman lengths of time, and a good deal of courage, he is the unlikely hero / classic underdog who deserves to survive. Plus his kids are too adorable to die, right?

As mentioned above, this is a long movie, and a good deal of the first act is completely unnecessary. We know the world’s going to end, we know John Cusack will go to any lengths to save his kids, we know the plot is going to lead us to the ark ships in China–so why bother showing us all this stuff, and slowly at that? There are a lot of characters to introduce early on, but that doesn’t excuse the flabby pacing, especially in such a lengthy picture. It picks up later on, but these early scenes are pretty dull.

And then there’s the picture itself. Videophiles will notice instantly that the movie was shot on digital tape: blacks are actually a kind of dark grey, movement is fuzzy and ugly, and the colours are dull and flat. This would’ve saved millions of dollars from the budget, but considering the delusions of grandeur the filmmakers are already experiencing by making a movie about the end of the freaking world, you’d think they would go all out and show it in crisp, filmic aesthetics. The frequent and bombastic visual effects look a lot better, maybe because they were rendered for film instead of video, and give us the bursts of rich colour and contrast that we need in a visual feast like this. I can’t remember a single note of the musical score, but the sound effects are your usual combination of petty human jabbering set against the throbbing bass of the apocalypse–so, very effective, then.

As far as performances go, they’re better than those in previous Emmerich flicks, but they’re still stiff and workmanlike. Any attempt at humour is killed before it starts by awkward delivery and timing, and you know it’s a sad day when a 7-year-old girl out-performs Danny Glover, but otherwise the acting is serviceable, and helps to give the incessant death and destruction a human face. Aside from simply delivering increasingly implausible lines of dialogue, some characters get a chance to display genuine emotion, which is a nice change from the likes of Godzilla and 10,000 BC, and it helps to anchor the film in familiar, human territory.

You know right off the bat exactly who is expendable and you can probably guess when and how they’ll die. A few major deaths towards the end are handled particularly poorly (in fact, there’s a whole sequence that feels chopped to pieces, with a significant jump in location that is confusing, especially in a climactic scene of the movie–should’ve cut more from the first act to add minutes to the third)–they should be impactful and emotional, instead we cut away before the people we’ve been living with for two hours meet their end. I’m not one for unnecessary violence, but if you show water rising around someone and then over their head but never cut back even to a floating body or a final bubbly exhalation, we’re not going to trust that they’re dead, which undermines the emotional impact of the scene.

The destruction scenes are relatively focused and restrained (we are dealing with the man behind Independence Day, people) and are thankfully quite brief; Chiwetel Ejiofor’s (say that out loud) character is relentlessly charismatic; John Cusack’s gruff fatherly anti-hero works a treat; Oliver Platt’s slimy politician antagonist is slimy, antagonistic; and the kids are cute and rarely get distracted by blinking lights off-camera. But most importantly, there are some interesting thoughts to be had while watching this movie.

How should people react in the face of impending doom? Why charge people a billion euros to get to safety if the economy won’t exist in a week’s time? Would 400,000 people be enough to repopulate the Earth from scratch? How much worth do you place on the other seven billion human beings who share our tiny island in space, unique in harbouring life?

I think that for a lot of people this film will fall just on the wrong side of cliché and stupid. But somehow, for me, the vaguely interesting characters and primitive sci-fi plot elements drag it over the line to the other side of bad. Don’t ask me how, or why (I should hate this movie), but you could do worse at your local multiplex. Just don’t hold your breath with John Cusack in the underwater scenes, you’ll probably pass out.

62/100

"I left the oven on!"