2012
Director: Roland Emmerich
I always thought the Orange cinema adverts featured John Cusack. It turns out I was wrong. The obnoxious producer who ruins independent films by introducing bizarre phone-related subplots to them is actually someone called Brennan Brown who happens to look like Cusack.
I mention this because 2012 features the real John Cusack in the lead role and has so many absurd plot devices – many of them telecom-related – that perhaps the Orange Film Board had some involvement in the production.
This is not to say 2012 is a bad film. By any rational criteria, it is, but disaster movies can hardly be judged by the same standards as proper cinema. Movies such as this succeed or fail by the absurdity of their plots, the realism of their explosions and how well judged the cheesy tragedies woven in to the storyline are.
By these standards, 2012 has a good stab at the first two but is so-so on the third. The storyline is pleasingly absurd (neutrinos from the sun have “mutated” and are “microwaving” Earth’s core, causing it to overheat with predictable calamitous effects) and the explosions are so enormous and frequent that you can practically feel the heat on your face.
Where the film falls a little flat even on its own terms is the over-reliance on pointless characters who are completely one-dimensional. Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), a nutty survivalist who reveals the government cover-up serves a purpose, even if he’s a
bit annoying. But why do we need to see scientist Adrian Helmsley’s father’s band-mate say goodbye to the granddaughter he never met as her home is annihilated by a mega-tsunami?
There is some good stuff here. It’s nice to see Tom McCarthy in a big role. While his character is a bit more likeable than the corrupt journalist he plays in The Wire, he does a good job of being bewildered and generally useless before being forced by circumstance into some good old-fashioned heroics – which is as things should be in a disaster flick. And it’s also a nice twist to see that the “ships” that our characters are heading for through the film are not actually spaceships but, well, real ships, designed to surf the tidal waves to safety when disaster strikes.
But the basic problem with this film, like so many others, is that it’s too long. A massive 158 minutes is too much for a moronic action movie.
Director Roland Emmerich clearly thinks characterisation and acting are strong points here. I think they were with his previous efforts Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. But the explosions are the real stars in 2012. A bit more of them and a lot less dialogue and this movie might really have shone.
Oli Usher
