Friday, May 20, 2011

Old Movie, New Review: 2012 (Get Your Rapture On).

Actually, I wasn't warned.

If you've dropped by this blog before, you know my affinity for end of days movies. And you know that I have my survival plan in place for the Apocalypse. Right now, I'm feeling pret-ty smug about thinking ahead, because apparently The Rapture is coming TOMORROW. Yikes!

With my blueprint set, I've had time to get into the spirit of things and catch up on my disaster flicks. After lingering in my Netflix queue for, hmmm, about a year, 2012 finally had its day. Watching it probably was the best way to convince me of the impending Rapture, because for the first time ever I fast-fowarded through an Apocalypse movie. OK, and this film had L.A. actually tilt Titanic-style and slide into the Pacific, so where did it go so hilariously wrong? Let's break it down!


Movie begins with a sequence of scenes setting up a feeling of lurking doom: scientists in India measuring unprecedented Earth crust temperatures, a Saudi prince being told "it" would take a billion Euros to get on "it", the Mona Lisa being replaced with a copy in the dead of night and secreted away.

One scientist, who we’ll see more of later, brings back an amazing but true warning to the American president (Danny Glover): the Earth’s crust is destabilizing. WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE.

Smash cut to John Cusack in L.A., picking up his kids from his ex-wife’s house. Amanda Peet and her New Husband establish that Cusack is a book writer/limo chauffeur and therefore a loser who often ignores his kids. They send off John and the kids as he drives away in the limo toward Yellowstone for a little vay-cay. Which, may I note, is an 18-hour trip. They’re called planes, guys.

Already we hit upon a major flaw of this movie. We’re well past 30 minutes and I’ve yet to see anything explode. We don’t care about these characters, Movie, we just want to see the Eiffel Tower sink into lava. Drawing it out further is the introduction of Woody Harrelson as a nutjob preaching the upcoming disaster/conspiracy over a radio from a camper in the middle of Yellowstone. 

John Cusack, fulfilling his loser role, leaves his kids in a tent in the middle of a National Park to have a beer with Woody (heh). Conveniently for us mouthbreathers, Woody has drawn a cartoon synopsis of the movie’s plot in Microsoft Paint (!) and John Cusack just happens to see it on Woody’s computer. Thus, the finer “scientific” points of this film are explained in paint squiggles...which is a waste of time, because it isn’t real science anyhow and why do we need to...ugg. Brainfreeze. Woody also says spaceships are going to save the last humans from the destruction of the Earth. Great vacation, Dad. 

Elsewhere, President Danny Glover drops by the G8 summit and requests a private meeting with the leaders of state. He lisps his way though this speech: “Six months ago, I was made aware of a situation so devastating that, at first, I refused to believe it... The world, as we know it, will soon come to an end.” [“Why is Danny Glover lisping?” – Us. “He has clear adult braces in real life.” – Wikipedia]

It is at this point that I start skipping through the story. Cue fireballs, please!

If you can dodge a building you
can dodge a fireball.
Back in L.A., John Cusack, realizing that Woody was legit, frantically tries to get his family out of the city to find a spaceship. Wow, I just typed that. What follows is the half hour of the movie I dub, “Can We Outrun It?” (yes):
Exhibit A: Cusack outrunning the crumbling of L.A. streets in a limo. Including successfully jumping more ramps than Evel Knievel but with the suspension of an extended Lincoln Continental.
Exhibit B: New Husband, with no flying experience, piloting a single engine plane through collapsing skyscrapers.
Exhibit C: Cusack commandeering Woody’s ancient camper + spaceship map and dodging fireballs in Yellowstone. I believe it, because fireballs rarely travel faster than 70-mph.

Do you feel like you’ve been reading this recap forever? Well, join the club because watching this movie felt like an eternity. At one hour and 30 minutes the film FINALLY shows some international destruction. This shot of the mountains being submerged by a tsunami is cool, but too little too late, Movie.

The last 80 hours of the film follow the Cusack family making their way to “the Ark”, the survival spaceship Woody predicted. The Ark is built on or next to Mt. Everest; I can't help but wonder if it would have been smarter to make a few of these things in different, more accessible locations.

In D.C., President Danny Glover meets the most inglorious end to a President in the history of disaster cinema. Crawling around in an ash pile alone then succumbing to a vertical wall of water descending on the capital...not macho.

Not porn.
Up in Air Force One, the scientist we met at the beginning consoles the President’s daughter. Not like that! He says that human culture will be preserved through all of the things they carry with them (plus that stashed Mona Lisa). He pulls out John Cusack’s character’s obscure book and says that means it’s part of their human legacy too. Well thank God he didn’t have a briefcase full of porn, because that would be a pretty shabby human legacy.

Let’s just skip to the Ark. Hey, all our characters made it there somehow! Shocking!

Ark-side. Some people boarding have been genetically selected to repopulate (why?) and others got on by paying a crap ton of money. Hi, Saudi prince! That makes vague sense in the scheme of how humans might think. However it isn’t clear where they are going to land and if that place could even sustain Earth lifeforms. So why the Hell are they also taking twos of giraffes and elephants?!

But wait for it. These aren’t spaceships they are literally ark boats and are going to float through the tsunami hurtling toward them. Dear Heaven, this movie. I think the film could have redeemed itself here by some sort of world destruction montage cut with the scenes on this Ark. The drama on the Ark seems too small-scale to be interesting this late in the game.

Don't worry, I live. No dramatic tension here.
I am sure you’ll be blown away to know that the Ark works and everyone aboard except New Husband lives. He was a plastic surgeon, so you knew it was coming. Superficial jerk. Randomly Africa, the whole thing, has survived the World Tsunami perfectly intact, as it rose several thousand feet during the "crust displacement". Now packing those elephants and giraffes looks double dumb because they all survived naturally. The Ark sets sail for the Country Formerly Known As South Africa...at which point I can only assume the survivors are mistaken for aliens and District 9 begins.

As a side note the marketing tag for this movie was: “We were warned”. That turns out to be highly inaccurate because no one in the movie, aside from Saudi princes and heads of state, was warned that the earth’s crust was going to disintegrate. Moral lesson: being rich is awesome. 

Final verdict: 2.5 out of 5 stars. L.A. falling into the ocean was entertaining enough to save this from a single star, but the length and tedium of the ending ensure I’ll never watch this again or recommend it to others. Extra half of a star goes to learning about Danny Glover’s unnecessary adult braces.

1 comment:

  1. I HATED THIS MOVIE!! It was sooo long and incredibly boring and once the destruction of the world finally happened...it was just painfully loud the remaining 2 hours (not an exaggeration I think this movie was something like 3 1/2 hours long, I'm pretty sure the dog started getting a headache)! Great review, however I am sad that you sat through this and then wasted more time writing about it. LOL

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