This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, not with a whimper, but spectacularly and very wetly. Pity most of us won’t be in the fortunate position of Jackson Curtis and family, who are able to watch it from an aircraft, so we won’t be able to appreciate the full effect, but if it’s anything like what 2012 postulates it should look pretty impressive.
It’s pleasant to see famous monuments such as Washington’s obelisk and St Peter’s in Rome topple and shatter; it’s fun to see whole coastal cities heaving up at an impossible angle and sliding into the sea. 2012 offers earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis. You can almost hear the galloping hooves of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, though in such a Hollywood extravaganza you’d have to doubt they’d be content with a mere four.
Director Roland Emmerich has always had a taste for the spectacular, as witness previous films of his such as Independence Day, Godzilla, 10Â 000 BC and The Day After Tomorrow. In the lastnamed the world ended too, on that occasion because global warming became global freezing overnight, so Emmerich has now made two apocalypses, which is one more than St John.
In 2012, the world is ending not because humanity has been over-producing carbon and pumping it willy-nilly into the atmosphere but because gamma rays from the sun have suddenly and mysteriously turned into microwaves and are melting the Earth’s core. You’d have thought that the clever people from The Core would have been able to solve that problem, but perhaps there wasn’t time to get hold of them.
At any rate, the poster says ”We were warned”, though it doesn’t mean we were warned by George Monbiot. We were apparently warned by the Mayan calendar, and someone close to Emmerich must have read Fingerprints of the Gods, in which Graham Hancock weaves his interpretation of that stone document into a tissue of intriguing speculations about pyramids, ancient super-civilisations, the shifting of the Earth’s crust and the like. What’s next for Emmerich — Atlantis?
At least it’s not humanity’s fault that the world is ending, which is a great relief. All that huffing and puffing about climate change and, really, it’s simply down to what insurance companies call ”acts of God”. Nothing we can do about it. Luckily God (or Emmerich) has seen fit to allow some of humanity to survive, in particular the family of Jackson Curtis, so we viewers can experience this amazing event through their eyes.
Curtis is a writer of books rather like Fingerprints of the Gods, it seems, or at least one such volume. I think the film makes out that his book is a novel, but I’m not sure, and that confusion between fact and fiction would be perfectly appropriate for such a movie. Either way, Curtis is a paranoid catastrophist whose obsessions have led to the end of his marriage, leaving him in the favoured starting position for Hollywood fathers: he has a family, but they are estranged, and he’s battling to be a good dad to them.
The apocalypse about to engulf the world will give him the opportunity to prove that he’s a hero-dad, which is bad news for the rest of humanity but good news for the Curtis family. The stepdad who has been filling his shoes in the meantime can be dispensed with in a minorly heroic way, with barely a shrug of regret from the family, and Curtis will have wife and kiddies back. If only it were so easy for divorced dads in the real world, who are short of global catastrophes to let them prove their worth.
Another thing in Curtis’s favour is that he is played by John Cusack, who brings a remarkable grace and irony to most of what he does. He is incapable of the straightforward kind of clunky machismo that a Bruce Willis, say, would have brought to such a role, let alone the purse-lipped angst that Tom Cruise contributed to a similar storyline when rescuing family and so on in The War of the Worlds. Cusack even manages to wear his standard attire, a long black coat — it must be in his contract. At least he will have got a good paycheck for being in this overblown poppycock.
Cusack gives 2012 what little intelligence it possesses, but it’s the kind of intelligence that watches with raised eyebrow while everything and everyone else in the movie acts really stupid. Co-star Amanda Peet may have been able to do something similar, but she’s not given the chance; she just has to play the desperate, shrieky mom.
Chiwetel Ejiofor certainly could have endowed 2012 with some sense, but he has been asked instead to play a scientist with permanently furrowed brow. He is responsible for discovering the imminent disaster, explaining it in two sentences to the audience and then to the president of the United States. The prez is a solid old codger, not a fly-by-night like Barack Obama, and he’s fortunate enough to have an escape plan ready, as hatched with other heads of state, presumably at the last G8 meeting. And those silly protesters thought such leaders were just working out more ways to get the Third World deeper into debt!
Woody Harrelson has a charmingly bonkers role as a paranoid prophet living in a trailer in Yellowstone Park and running a private and probably pirate radio station. He’s a lot of fun, but unfortunately there’s not much of him in the film. He’s not even really needed for the plot, which is otherwise connected and pushed onwards by a series of extraordinary coincidences.
Curtis happens to work as a driver for a Russian billionaire who has already signed up for the official escape plan. The billionaire has a mistress who happens to be a patient of Curtis’s kids’ stepdad, a plastic surgeon by trade. And the stepdad, providentially for the Curtis family, happens to be a pilot on the side, hence all that useful flying. Coincidentally, Ejiofor’s scientist has read Curtis’s only book, just in time to bump into him and the kids — unless that’s not coincidence but the working out of some vast, unseen plan for humanity, or at least those chosen to survive. I don’t know. Ask the Mayans.