Review: 2012

     There are many varying beliefs that the world will end catastrophically. The Mayans in particular believe that the end of the world starts with a cosmic alignment of the sun with the center of our Galaxy, which happens to be in December of the year 2012. The cosmic alignment will cause the sun to have wild solar flares which will emit neutrinos that will act like microwaves on the planet's inner core, heating up the center of the earth until the crust begins to melt and the tectonic plates shift and cause massive earthquakes and eventually tsunamis, wiping out the inhabitants of the world. The question is: how are we going to survive it?
    That is what Roland Emmerich's newest disaster movie 2012 bases its action on. Several families across the face of the earth must survive the ensuing earthquakes that split the earth and kill billions. Emmerich, a native German, has been making disaster movies for years. Independence Day (1996) was about aliens attempting to destroy the earth, Godzilla (1998) had a giant lizard destroy Manhattan, and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) saw the side effects of pollution cause massive global warming to the point of human destruction. Each movie bears its own set of cheesy families fighting for all of humanity.

The Tsunami pours over the mountains...

     According to Robin Wood and Christian Metz, these families are what the American public wants to see. John Cusack plays Jackson Curtis, a divorced writer still trying to save his family, both literally and in the sense of the ideological family. This ideological family is the two parents (of opposite sex) and two children, one son and one daughter. The family starts out broken, a divorce separates the parents and the children seem more privy to their new dad, Gordon (Thomas McCarthy) who dotes them with cell phones and attention. But, in the end, it is the ideological family that wins out, and the audience cheers when the mom and dad get back together again.

The Curtis family's first plane flies through two falling buildings.

 

     Another, not so prominently featured part of the American Dominant Ideology theory is the male dominance in the film. Of course, the scientists who discover that the world will end in three years are all males, and they bring the information to male politicians who see to it that they are saved. Also, when John Cusack's family is in an airplane flying to China with a family from Russia, Gordon (who is forced to pilot the massive cargo plane on just two flying lessons) comes to the cargo hold to ask the two men to come look at the issues they will be facing. In essence, it is the men who will protect and save the women, and who willingly give their lives to save their families.
     Robin Wood's Ideological film theory claims that the American public believes in the Rosebud syndrome (as from Citizen Kane, 1941). The Russian family flying with the Curtis family are billionaires, having payed billions to be saved. But clearly, money cannot buy you happiness. The Russian family seems broken, money having bought the father's new girlfriend, who isn't the brightest. The sons are two brats ready to cut down their American family counterparts.

Yellowstone explodes.

     Lastly, the ideological theory calls for a resolution of current pressing issues. Our current pressing issue is the ticking timeclock the Mayan calandar layed out for us. Only three years away, December of 2012 is an oddly pressing issue for many people today, and they're all wondering what we're going to do to survive it. 2012 offers that wildly outrageous solution for us. The billionaire Russian family has recently paid billions of dollars to get tickets onto an ark. The bigtime male politician to whom the scientists brought the information of the end of the world, have used the money from the tickets to build seven enormous arks (like from Noah's Ark in the bible) to store the people when the tsunamis come and flood the planet. Thus, only the rich can survive... but, being human is to care for each other, so they open the gates to the arks to let in all those who are in the vicinity, including the workers who helped build the ships.
     The movie cost $200 million to make, most of that money going to the immense amounts of CG (I swear that 85% of the film was CG). Although the film has already earned that money back and then-some (although 75% of its gross so far has been from foreign box offices), it really has nothing to offer its audience outside the satisfaction of the dominant ideology. The Movie was shot on a Panasonic HD camera, probably since most of it was going to be going through the computer to be CGed up, making the whole movie seem a lot more fake to me. HD cameras just aren't good enough yet for me to enjoy watching a 2 hour and 40 minute movie recorded in it.

Escaping from the ensuing disaster... a sight seen more than once.

     The movie really lasted too long, and there were so many cheesy moments I wanted to gag. I found myself throwing my hands up in the air at every syntagma (plot point), angry either with the poor CG (or at least its overuse) or with the poor design of the story, or with a decision the characters made, or with some outrageous moment, or something else, OR SOME OTHER STUPID THING! Really, there is no need to see this movie, unless you want to know just how much CG one can actually fit into a "Live Action" film... It gets me real excited for Avatar!