Directed by Roland Emmerich
|
2012 Do
short titles always make for long, unbearable films? I would say in this case they do. Roland Emmerich
has made a disaster film in which the entire surface of the Earth is going to
be completely remade by forces coming from the sun, and only a select few
have any chance to survive it, though of course you and I are not among the
lucky few, meaning we have to sit through two and a half hours of it before
we can be released. Okay, here we
go: And believe me, I’m not
giving any thing away. Scientists
have determined that huge storms on the surface of the sun have heated up the
crust of the earth so that by December 2012, all the surface of the planet
will be, well, goo. And hundreds,
thousands, millions, billions of earthlings will die. Naturally the big megillah
starts in Los Angeles, as the city falls into the Pacific. Just ahead of the tragedy, however, a
family – maybe I should say a former family, consisting of John Cusack
and his former wife, Amanda Peet and their two
children, plus her new boyfriend, are having a little spat. He’s taking the children for a
camping trip to Yellowstone – and forget that
it’s fifteen hundred miles to get there. At
their old campground
he and the kids discover a Glen Beck type of radio personality
talking about the end of the world, and they can see for themselves that what
used to be a lake is now a puddle.
Uh-oh. Meanwhile, back in
Washington, the president’s advisors (Oliver Platt and Chiwetel Ejiofor) have known |