After having written and directed such films as (the excellent) Independence Day (1996) and (the not-so-excellent) The Day After Tomorrow (2004), disaster-meister Roland Emmerich has really outdone himself this time with 2012 for what we've got here is the The Exorcist of disaster movies. I kid you not.
John Cusack stars in a leading role as struggling novelist Jackson Curtis, and I've come to know that it's always a good sign if Cusack's name is on the marquee. Chiwetel Ejiofor turns in an understated performance in a key role as scientist Adrian Helmsley, underrated screen-stealer Oliver Platt is hard-boiled technocrat Carl Anheuser while Woody Harrelson --always a welcome face on the screen-- as oddball radio ham Charlie Frost and Danny Glover, of Lethal Weapon fame and now with a pronounced (and rather sinister) lisp, as widowed US President Thomas Wilson round off a cast that in my book is a stroke of genius.
It doesn't matter though.
With 2012, Emmerich directs a movie that plays on the doomsday prophesy as foretold by (among others, I understand) the ancient Mayan civilization and that is supposed to take place on 21 December 2012, the day of the Great Alignment. It foretells a period of great change. What kind of change, nobody knows.
Emmerich uses the room that's created by this unknownness to move around creatively and do what he does best: visiting worst-case doom scenarios upon humanity by mixing scientific fact with popular myth. Normally his films are to be taken with a grain of salt and tongue planted in cheek. It's escapism he offers you, so you treat it accordingly.
Not so this time around. Like I said, Emmerich has outdone himself. It doesn't matter whether it's by chance or design, but 2012 tugged a raw chord with yours truly. Admittedly, I went and took in the movie a half-believer and, with the recent disaster events in Indonesia tucked away in the back of my mind, that's all it takes really.
2012 starts in present-day 2009 as we find Helmsley on a scientific mission in India where he discovers that unprecedented violent solar flares are reacting with and heating up the earth's insides. He reports his findings to Anheuser, who sets in motion a top-secret protocol and as time ticks away towards the dreaded point in time in 2012, we witness rich folk making mysterious deals with faceless folk against a backdrop of foreboding natural events. In a separate storyline we find Curtis taking his kids on a camping trip to Yellowstone but only to find their usual spot fenced off by the army. He then chances upon Frost, a gung-ho conspiracist, who fills him in on what's really going on, which he shrugs off but, back in the city, a chain of events of increasing magnitude makes him doubt his own scepticism.
Watching buildings tumbling over and streets splitting open as a result of massive earthquakes is unnerving. So is the sight of places of religious significance, e.g. the Vatican, crumbling to pieces. It lends 2012 a biblical quality, if you will, which makes it eerie.
Emmerich may or may not be aware of this. He slips in his trademark humour and his trademark save-the-dog scene, but that can be interpreted either as him showing pity with a "there, there" on the shoulder, or him being unaware and thinking this to be just another of his disaster movies.
Well, it isn't.
(Running time: 158 minutes)
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