Movie Review: 2012

2012 (2009) 

Directed by Roland Emmerich 

Written by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser 

Starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson

Release Date November 13th, 2009

Published November 12th, 2009 

2012 hysteria has gotten so out of hand that NASA was compelled to put out a press release stating that the Mayan Calendar does not predict the end of the world. Indeed, the planets will align in 2012 but they will as they have numerous times before without massive worldwide destruction. Could there be a better endorsement for the new goofball disaster flick 2012? This latest project from world destruction expert Roland Emmerich goes off the rails of reality from jumpstreet but knows it, accepts it, and even has a little fun being all earnest and serious about stuff blowin' up real good.

John Cusack leads an ensemble cast in 2012 as Jackson Curtis. A failed writer, Jackson drives a limousine for a living and that is how he arrives to take his two kids camping for the weekend. Jackson is estranged from his wife Kate (Amanda Peet) who has remarried to a plastic surgeon, Gordon (Thomas McCarthy).

Jackson is taking the kids camping at a rather odd moment. All over California giant cracks are forming. There are a number of mini-earthquakes and other ominous signs of doom that Jackson and family choose to ignore. Meanwhile, across the country a government geologist, Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has discovered that the end of the world is nigh.

The sun is firing off flares that become neutrinos that are heating the earth's core and blah, blah, blah, let's just say science is merely a touchstone for 2012 and leave it at that. The necessary info is that the world will soon end. What luck that there is a solution in place. Giant ships called Arcs will whisk the wealthy, privileged and connected of the world to safety on the high seas while the average folks die horribly.

Thanks to a wacked out, Art Bell wannabe, well played by Woody Harrelson doing a fabulous Dennis Hopper impression, ....Jackson.... finds out about the Arcs and aims to get his kids, ex-wife and even his romantic rival to ..Asia.. where the Arcs are being loaded up.

Basic set up, establish the stakes, establish our everyman hero and then rain down the CGI destruction. You have to give this to Roland Emmerich, the idea is efficient. If only the actual film were so cut to the quick. 2012, despite many guilty pleasures, lingers for nearly three hours blowing up monuments and killing dignitaries.

If you enjoy carnage and human sacrafice then you may marvel at watching priests crushed by the Sistine Chapel. The Pope gets crushed by the ....Vatican.... and the President of the ....United States....? He gets an aircraft carrier named for John F. Kennedy dropped on him.

Roland Emmerich really enjoys these scenes to much. Really, it's rather unseemly, the pleasure that Emmerich seems to take in staging these CGI deaths. It's comparable to the joys that a director like Eli Roth takes in torturing his average Jane characters, minus the misogyny but with a healthy dose of blasphemy.

It is that unseemly quality, along with the film's exorbitant length, that makes me resist liking 2012. And I really kinda want to. The CGI destruction is well crafted and even kind of exciting, especially watching a commuter plane fly between falling buildings.

John Cusack and Chiwetel Ejiofor are shockingly effective in building human surrogates from the rubble of expository dialogue, running and screaming that are the main components of their characters. Amand Peet, Danny Glover and Thandie Newton round out a main cast right at home in a disaster movie ensemble. 

I kind of want to recommend 2012 because there is some real good camp and some terrific CGI. Unfortunately, the film overstays its welcome and becomes a little to blood lusty for my taste. The seemingly random fates of well known heads of state, and a few filler characters, leave a bad taste that I just cannot shake. 

2012 is a movie for the forgiving fan of big, dumb loud, world ending blockbusters only.

Movie Review The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) 

Directed by Roland Emmerich

Written by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Roland Emmerich

Starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward, Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum

Release Date May 28th, 2004

Published May 27th, 2004 

Being a liberal Democrat and environmentalist, I am supposed to be excited that a major summer blockbuster is taking up a cause I care about.

I’m not.

I am not at all excited that a topic as important as global warming is getting the Hollywood treatment, especially from the director who brought us Godzilla. The Day After Tomorrow plays at being important in its marketing campaign only to cover up its utter goofiness as a movie.

Dennis Quaid stars as Jack Hall, everyman Paleoclimatologist with a thing for the end of humanity because of global warming. So into saving future generations from what he believes is a coming ice age, he has lost contact with his wife (Sela Ward) and his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Jack spends most of his time with his partners Frank (Jay O. Sanders) and Jason (Dash Mihok) traveling the polar ice caps. Their most recent excursion uncovered something dangerously unexpected that proves Jack’s theory about the ice age. Unfortunately, when Jack pitches his theory at a conference in New Delhi India, he is blown off by the Vice President of the United States (Kenneth Walsh). The VP is more concerned about American wallets than the survival of the human race.

Of course, Jack’s theory applies to an ice age in say 100 years from now, which may be why the VP is less than impressed. Nevertheless, something good comes out of it when Jack meets Dr. Terry Rapson who will play an important role when Jack’s theory comes true much sooner than he expected.

Jack’s theory is that melting polar ice caps will cause the jetstream to stop delivering warm air to much of the Northern Hemisphere, leaving it a frozen wasteland. We are tipped to some serious trouble when Japan is hit with bricks of hail, Los Angeles is devastated by multiple tornadoes and New York City turns into a swimming pool.

More bad news for Jack, his son Sam along with some schoolmates, Brian (Arjay Smith) and Laura (Emmy Rossum) are in New York and trapped by the rising waters in the top floor of the New York Public Library. Now Jack and his team must trek through the rapidly freezing countryside from Washington DC to New York to save his son. Meanwhile, his ex-wife must decide whether to stay with a dying child and wait for a rescue that might not come or join the hordes of Americans heading for the safety and warmth of Mexico.

The film has a solid three act structure, act one the storm, act two the survival and act three the rescue. Of course, director Roland Emmerich who also wrote the film’s script, can’t resist throwing in extraneous touches like a boneheaded sendup of the Bush administration that even the most ardent Bush haters will roll their eyes at. The dying child I mentioned before, exists only to give Sela Ward something to do and is resolved with little drama.

And then there are the wolves. Yes, for some reason wolves have escaped from the New York Zoo and attack our heroes at the most opportune time.

Now the thing that is garnering the most attention about this film is its tenuous grasp of global warming and environmental issues. To the film’s credit, there is no mention of saving the planet, Emmerich has at least grasped the idea that saving the environment is not about the planet, it’s about saving human beings. That said, his ridiculous ideas about global warming, polar ice caps and so-called SUPER storms are more fiction than science.

There may indeed be an ice age in the future but that is part of the cyclical nature of the planet. There has been an ice age before and there will be one again, whether we cause it or not. There is little evidence we could cause it and that is where the film’s specious logic goes beyond its dramatized idea of a six day ice age and into the dangerous situation of casting a negative light on real environmental issues.

The fact is that a summer blockbuster is no place for such big ideas. Summer blockbusters are to dazzle the eye with cheap thrills and loud noises, if they can also be entertaining on top of that, it’s truly an accomplishment. This portentous idea of a blockbuster with global concerns only serves to denigrate those concerns by dragging them down to the level of the big, dumb, loud blockbuster.

On top of all those problems is that the film is just dull as dirt. While some of the special effects are impressive, every bit of character including the usually reliable Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal are annoying, cloying caricatures of melodramatic TV drama characters. This is WB level drama, especially the group of misfits at the library.

The film is interminable halfway through, where the storm and the impressive effects are pretty well over. After that, the film’s atrocious dialogue must carry the day. At 2 hours plus, The Day After Tomorrow makes you wish it were really tomorrow and the movie was a distant memory.

Movie Review 10,000 B.C

10,000 B.C 

Directed by Roland Emmerich 

Written by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser 

Starring Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis 

Release Date March 7th, 2008 

Published March 6th, 2008 

Director Roland Emmerich has a track record that only Uwe Boll might envy. Based on the success of his one, Will Smith aided, success, Independence Day, Emmerich has been handed massive budget followed by massive budget to make one awful movie after another. There was Mel Gibson's jingoistic yay America, faux history actioner, The Patriot. Then Emmerich assassinated the legendary cheeseball Japanese monster Godzilla. Then he made a joke of environmental science with the mind numbingly awful The Day After Tomorrow. Now Emmerich is denigrating the stone age with his Flintstones-esque 10,000 B.C. I take that back, The Flintstones has more historical integrity than anything with Roland Emmerich's name on it.

Steven Strait, the vacant eyed, model cheekboned star of The Covenant takes the lead role in 10,000 B.C as D'leh. After his father deserted the tribe to chase the hunt, D'Leh became an outcast. Raised by dad's best friend Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis), D'Leh lived to live down his father's shame. Thus when given the chance to hunt the massive wooly mammoth he risks his life to be the one to take down the beast. Secondary to overcoming his shame is winning the hand of the fair, blue eyed, Evolet (Camilla Bell), a transplant from another tribe that was overrun by four legged demons.

Those 4 legged demons are actually another tribe; smarter and more vicious than our heroes. They have horses. This evil tribe overruns other tribes, takes the men hostage and uses them to build temples to their pagan gods. When the four legged demons come to D'Leh's camp they kill men, women and children and take as many hostages as possible. A rare few survive and escape including D'Leh and his mentor Tic'Tic. Now they must hunt the hunters and free their people so that D'Leh can reclaim his girl, she was taken hostage, and become the leader of his tribe.

That is the plot in a linear, logical sense, and it's not bad in description. Unfortunately, as executed by Roland Emmerich and his apparently amateur effects team, 10,000 B.C plays alternately like the worst of Mystery Science Theater schlock or a bad Saturday Night Live skit. A scene early in the film where D'Leh and company hunt wooly mammoths literally features scenes of actors obviously running in place in front of a green screen. Later, the masses of extras building temples for the bad guys comes off as stolen stock footage of Liz Taylor's Cleopatra.

Then there is our star Steven Strait. Anyone who saw his work in the indie music drama Undiscovered, the film best known for the acting debut of Ashlee Simpson, knows that vacant stare and empty good looks. This ex-model leads a cast of gap ad ready cavemen into battle against what can only be described as the cast of the Arabic Project Runway. The bad guys, aside from a couple of toughs who lead the human hunting party, are an effete, pageantry loving people who mince like Rip Taylor in the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade. Why? Who knows why? But they do.

In a career of really bad movies, Roland Emmerich has finally hit his career low. If he can make a movie more ludicrous and amateurish, I hope we never see it. 10,000 B.C is a brutal, mind numbing, unintentionally humorous trip back in time.