I went to see the new 2012 movie yesterday. I’ve enjoyed Roland Emmerich’s other movies (eg Independence Day and the Day After Tomorrow). 2012 is quite the thriller, but it is mostly a grand series of destructive special effects tied together very loosely by a very little bit of story.
For fans of the Mayan-2012 connection, the film will surely be disappointing, since the calendar is mentioned only a few times during the revealing of the back story and has nothing to do with the plot (other than it being an early revelation that the “Earth has an expiration date”).
LA sliding into the sea, the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, the destruction of St. Peters in Rome, “what happens to the White House” (to name a few of the major special effects of the movie) are mind-boggling in their intensity, but for my money, “the great escape”, where our hero gets his family out of the destruction of LA, will go down in movie history as one of the greatest escape episodes in cinema. It is all so improbable and even impossible that it works very nicely in an adrenaline inducing sort of way.
All special effects aside, the movie does have an interesting “point” — and that is the truly epic evil of of all of the world’s governments in the face of the crisis. Years ahead of the actual event, the world’s governments become aware of the coming geological changes. They decide to keep it secret, and begin working feverishly on a plan to save 400,000 people — but not just any people, of course, they are saving elite people, and charging them upwards of a billion dollars a seat in their “arks”. The world’s population is kept in the dark about this until the destruction is upon them and it is too late for people to do anything to save themselves.
That conniving evil in high places is the most believable aspect of the movie.