Mobile
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Film / Film Reviews / News 2012: A bad year for film
Posted By Matt Brunson on Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 11:50 PM
By Matt Brunson
2012
*1/2
DIRECTED BY Roland Emmerich
STARS John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor
The perfect follow-up for those moviegoers who were simply crushed when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen wrapped up at a too-brief 142 minutes, 2012 contributes another 158 minutes to the cause of wham-bam-thank-you-man cinema. No effect is too preposterous, no sound too deafening, and no cliché too enormous to be left out of the latest end-of-the-world effort from director Roland Emmerich, who there but for the grace of God goes Michael Bay.
On balance, I can handle Emmerich's output better than Bay's, but it's clear that the gap between them is shrinking at a rapid clip. Emmerich's Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow may have been dopey, but both were carried off with a certain degree of panache, and ID at least gave us the lingering image of the White House being blown to smithereens by invading aliens. In 2012, we see the White House being crushed by a wayward naval vessel, a visual more moronic than iconic.
2012 brushes through the fuzzy science — basically, the sun is responsible for Earth's impending doom, predicted by the Mayans way back when — in order to devote more of its time to its inane assortment of cardboard characters and the CGI effects that will wow some but fail to move others (they alternate between impressive and obvious). John Cusack is the all-American protagonist, a stock underachiever named Jackson Curtis (not to be confused with Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) who must rise from Everyman to Superman in order to save not only himself but his fractured family unit (ex-wife, distant son, chipper daughter). There's also the well-meaning scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the duplicitous politician (Oliver Platt), the self-sacrificing U.S. president (Danny Glover), the conspiracy-theory nut who turns out to be right about everything (Woody Harrelson, whose zealotry was a lot more fun to watch in Zombieland), and so on. Even "master of disaster" Irwin Allen liked to shake up the status quo in such films as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, but Emmerich has no imagination: His A-listers live, his support players die. Worse, he subscribes to a rigid ethical code usually reserved for slasher films and fundamentalist diatribes: Likable characters tempted by the flesh suffer mean-spirited ends, as does anyone who dares to stand in the way of traditional family values.
Such sermonizing takes a back seat, of course, to the action sequences, which basically seem to run on the same loop: A car (or plane) misses getting crushed by only this much. It's marginally exciting the first 20 times it happens, less so the subsequent 30 times it's shown. Then again, practically everything about the picture is lazy and uninspired, making 2012 just one more blockbuster that's strictly by the numbers.
Speaking of...
-
Computer Science And Photography – Matthew Mills a Photographer in NYC Explains This Unlikely Pairing
Nov 22, 2020 -
Imagicomm Entertainment to Make Blue Ridge Available on Multiple Platforms
Oct 15, 2020 -
The Moffett Restaurant Group Celebrates the 20th Anniversary of Barrington’s Restaurant
Oct 12, 2020 - More »
Comments
Showing 1-1 of 1
Latest in The CLog
More by Matt Brunson
-
Fanning flames of expectation
Apr 26, 2019 -
That burning sensation
Apr 19, 2019 -
Gentle giant
Apr 19, 2019 - More »
-
Fashion strike
Pin Up, Pin Down event at 10 Park Lanes raises money for a good cause.
-
Question the Queen City: Charlotte's many nicknames 5
"Banktown," "Queen City," "City of Churches," the "Hornets Nest" - what gives?
-
Question the Queen City: The unsolved death of Delette Nycum 2
The trial that followed was nothing short of a Charlotte version of the O.J. Simpson spectacle.
