MUBI

2012 is Roland Emmerich’s latest exercise in disaster pornography, a genre label I can’t exactly say is a bad thing. Emmerich seems to be the only Hollywood filmmaker out there capable of putting these films together and turning a profit. Wolfgang Peterson, another German director working in Hollywood, made a superior attempt at this with Poseidon, unfortunately his earnest attempt at remaking the disaster classic was met with an unfairly cold reception, so Emmerich is pretty much the only game in town for the disaster genre, for better or worse. Emmerich has destroyed the White House, frozen New York City, and overrun Madison Square Garden, and after his ill-fated attempt at creating a barbarian genre-flick with 10,000 B.C., he has decided that destroying iconic landmarks isn’t good enough, the entire world must go. Here he demolishes Los Angeles, crushes Vatican City, ruins that statue of Jesus in Rio, and engulfs Las Vegas in ash, ensuring everything will stay in Vegas for awhile. Lots of other stuff gets blown up real good too. There are characters caught in the middle of all this, but it wasn’t really worth paying attention during those parts. Almost every scene of destruction is exciting, but very little of what is there sticks with you. The best bit comes early where John Cusack flees a rapidly crumbling L.A. with his family, and the chaotic spectacle is stunning. The problem is that it rings false and very little of it has much weight. Time passes with some good actors playing uninteresting characters before another scene of destruction occurs, and yet despite the world ending as we know it, there is little to invest in what is going emotionally. It’s just an excuse for Emmerich to blow up the planet because, well, he can.

Everything I saw leading up to the release of this movie was impressive, even though films like this are generally an easy sell, however it was impossible for the director to not to slip into his usual tics that completely ruin his concepts. Roland Emmerich has always been a director who has blindly adhered to the Blake Snyder school of “saving the cat,” a vulgar practice that involves rescuing the cute animal an imminent threat in order to win over the audience. I would argue that if you have to ask yourself whether or not you should save the cute animal from danger, you probably shouldn’t have the little fucker in the script to begin with. This cynical audience-pandering is the worst of the worst, especially when human characters are killed off without much thought, while the film fusses over a damn critter. But maybe it’s because the humans themselves aren’t very interesting. Granted, I would much rather spend two and half hours with John Cusack than, say, Matthew Broderick in Godzilla, but then again, there is no reason I should have to spend two and a half hours with this movie at all. Cusack spends the movie trying to get from L.A. to a place in China where sci-fi Noah’s Ark ships are being built to preserve humanity. Along the way he meets Yakov Smirnoff, his two bratty sons, his bimbo girlfriend, the chick who got naked in The Whole Nine Yards, Hitman Harrelson’s son, and that badass black guy from Redbelt and Serenity. Very few of these characters are interesting, and the time between each spectacle seems to drag, which isn’t helped by the fact that the destruction gets less and less interesting each time we see it. Emmerich is good at constructing safe, non-threatening, popcorn roller-coasters, and he’d be better at it if he didn’t always design them to stop at various points during the ride to look at something completely dull. It just can’t deliver the goods where it counts during its unreasonably long running time, and it wears out its welcome very quickly. Movies like this work well as lean, mean, destruction machines, ninety minutes of chaos and mayhem with characters that take fifteen minutes to win over your investment before they spend the next seventy five getting out of terrible situations and occasionally killing the ones that don’t. Filmmakers like Roland Emmerich just can’t help themselves, they have to over-complicate things, and that’s why this apocalypse is one worth sleeping through most of, at least until the next year when we’re all supposedly doomed.

Every other scene ended with the exact same action sequence (in both physical action and in shots): A vehicle is waiting to leave, but one person is left behind. The ground starts to crumble everywhere except, miraculously, inches away from just behind the vehicle and a clear path in front. (one scene its a limo, another an RV, another a plane, another a bigger plane, another a giant arc ship. Imagine that, the vehicle gets bigger in every sequence). The missing person of course makes it just in time, and then there a a chase scene with every crumbling around them, except the straight path in front of them. Thankfully, or not so much due to the pure improbability, in one shot a building actually falls in front of the car. Unfortunately, instead of going around the building the plow straight through it, and get through just fine. We always get a “dramatic” overhead shot of the vhicle barely escaping the crumbling ground. EVERY FRICKIN SCENE!

Then, inbetween these carbon-copy getaway scenes we are blessed with the cheesiest smelliest moldy cheese they are trying to pass for drama. The most brilliant of them all is the grocery scene. There is a couple’s fight which comes completely out of nowhere, and fumbles in awkwardly.. right in the middle of the lame argument, the husband says something like “I feel like our relationship is tearing apart” …cue the earthquake, and the ground literally tears apart right between them, with a shot from the crater, looking up, as the couple’s arms reach across the crater, attempting to hold each other. WOW, subtlety and drama at its finest.

Im not even going to touch the premise implausibilities that smack you in the face throughout. Afterall this is a dumb action movie that is for pure entertainment. I can forgive implausibilities in relation to the premise or major plot points, with a movie like this, but cant forgive immediate plausibility problems that have to do with a car crashing through an entire falling building and still being able to drive for 100s of miles after, because somthing like that easily did not have to happen, or just how close the crumbling ground gets to the car. Again, it doesnt have to be that farfetched, the more farfetched it is the less suspenceful. There is a balance. The audience knows, they are going to get away, that is inevitable in any story, otherwise the story would stop. However, the audience should fee in the moment, that it is real enough and believable enough that the character might not get away. If it is stretched too far where it is unbelievable that anyone/thing in that situation could escape, then the suspense becomes non existent. That is EVERY action sequence here. Non believable repetitive, over-the-top excess, that goes so far, you never feel anything because it has been pushed beyond that point.

On top of lame improbable nonsuspenceful repetitive action sequences and pathetic drama, is the fact that it is not entertaining at all. Take a movie like Independence Day from the same director. At least that movie got the audience to cheer for Will Smith and Against the aliens. sure its simple nobrainer fun, but it was just that FUN. There are no such thrills here. As already mentioned, the action scenes are too implausible taking away all suspense, and they are so repetitive, we know exactly how they will play out because, we’ve seen them in other movies, and even further, we saw EXACTLY the same sequence with another vehicle just a few minutes earlier. But perhaps beyond this, is John Cusak, whom I LOVE in movies like High Fidelity, Say Anything, or Better Off Dead, but who is REPEATEDLY horrible in action movies like this and Con Air and similar. He does not have that type of charisma to carry off horrible dialogue. He does not have the persona to really deliver a one liner like a Will Smith or Bruce Willis can. They can turn those one liners into gold, into purely entertaining crowd pleasing moments. Sure they can be dumb, but in these movies it is acceptable. But here there was none of that because, Cusack is just horrible at action movies. He doesnt have the charisma of a Will or Bruce, not the edge of a Dafoe, Clive Owen, or the patheticness of a Justin Long or Edward Norton. He brings nothing to an action or suspence movie, hell lately in love movies like serendipity he is also horrible.

The only thing that saved this movie, and had any entertainment value in ANY sense, was Woody Harrelson.

I came into the movie with super low expectations merely wanting suspenseful and entertaining action, and it still did not deliver.

Roland Emmerich’s short-sighted and superficial disaster epic almost has enough star power and visual effects to sustain two and a half hours of entertainment. It’s highly suspenseful, even though it’s absurdly repetitive. There’s three sequences in which an airplane just barely takes off in time while John Cusack continually outruns crackling faultlines with Olympian-level speed. Also, at least three sentimental phone conversations are had over the course of the movie. Things get pretty corny in a laugh-out-loud way, obliterating the longevity of any pertinent themes or commentaries on the destructive, self-serving nature of mankind. Really, though, the script is awful. Danny Glover and Woody Harrelson do wonderfully in their roles, and the rest of the cast adheres to the material well enough. It’s adventure comedy at best, made only to be seen once, and in the cinemas.