Atlantic City Weekly

Director Roland Emmerich knows how to blow things up real good. He has become the modern day “Master of Disaster,” a title once bestowed on filmmaker Irwin Allen thanks to the success of his back-to-back blockbusters The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.

Allen was the king of the disaster flick; Emmerich ups the ante with his “end of days” apocalyptic visions that began with the earth vs. invaders fun of Independence Day. This was followed by the somber and emotionally engaging The Day After Tomorrow, which had a plot about a monumental climate shift that bring on a new ice age, and a likable father-son story story at its heart.

Emmerich is all in with the bombastic 2012, which suggests that the Mayan calendar was correct and that the Earth’s crust is going to go bonkers and destroy the world as we know it in a couple of years.

Movies that intend to dominate the screen with special effects don’t work unless the human component is just that — human. And while John Cusack is a the perfect actor to play a nice guy working stiff caught in the middle of hell on Earth, the first half of 2012 plays like a video game. It is pretty ridiculous as Jackson Curtis (Cusack) manages to avoid crashing skyscrapers and crumbling highways in Los Angeles as he tries to get his family to safety. It’s beyond ridiculous and makes believing the premise nearly impossible.

Before we get to the family man struggling to survive in the chaos, we begin in 2009 with the scientists (led by Chiwetel Ejiofor as Dr. Adrian Helmsley) who have figured out that catastrophe is right around the corner and lets the government bigwigs in on the secret.

In this completely cynical take on the classic “we can’t save everybody” scenario, it seems that the governments of the world have decided to keep the end of the world a secret from the general population. Instead they have decided who is worthy of being saved to keep the human race at the top of the pecking order when it’s all sorted out.

Yes the best and the brightest — and a bunch of military types and politicians — will be saved as well as the world’s billionaires who can afford to pay for tickets. Well, the governments have to have working capital to build the ships don’t they?

Perhaps I’m putting too much faith in the fourth estate, but it is also hard to believe that 46 governments have been able to keep this secret for two years. Heck, reporters seem to sniff out every dirty little secret about celebrities — if that same dedication was concentrated on tracking down leads on the world coming to an end I think they would find something. The point is when a movie gives you enough time to think about such issues, and perhaps what you are planning for dinner that night, it is not engaging the audience on a personal gut level.

That said, the second half of the film, when Curtis and his family are trying to fly to China (where the ships have been built), has a strong emotional connection and less special effects.

Before special effects were so sophisticated and computer-generated, filmmakers concentrated more on the story. The effects were part of the attraction, but if the human beings weren’t worth saving, the premise collapsed.

2012 has its moments, but the farfetched beginning is such a turn-off that as the story rights itself and becomes more credible, we don’t have as much patience to forgive the absurdities of the overblown special effects that dominate the first half.

At least I didn’t and I’m a fan of both Waterworld and The Postman, which technically are both post-apocalyptic flicks, but you get the implication. I’m an easy mark when it comes to disaster flicks and 2012 was just too ridiculous to win me over.

2012 **
Directed by Roland Emmerich; rated PG-13

To read more about movies and other topics covered by movie critic Lori Hoffman under her blog alias Moviejunkie, visit http://blog.acweekly.com/