Director: Roland Emmerich
Cast: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson
Screenplay: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser
158 mins. Rated PG-13 for intense disaster sequences and some language.
So 2012 came and went. We survived. This movie is now forfeit. My review of 2012 begins now.
Our movie starts in 2009 as Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave, Salt) discovers solar flares that somehow mean that the world is going to come to an end (I doubt the 45 minutes of expository science boils down to much). He makes Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt, X-Men: First Class, Chef) and President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover, Saw, Bad Ass 2: Bad Asses) aware of the Earth’s impending doom, and a plan is set into motion to do as much as possible to begins saving lives.
Flash forward to 2012. Jackson Curtis (John Cusack, Being John Malkovitch, The Bag Man) is a failing novelist who wishes to spend the weekend with his kids at Yellowstone. There, he comes across Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson, No Country for Old Men, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1), a crazed conspiracy theorist who knows all about the end of the world. Then, the world starts ending.
2012 is a movie that you can get drunk with some friends and just watch things get destroyed. It is also a horrible movie signifying the death of director Roland Emmerich’s career (he had already decided to make this his last disaster movie, which leads me to the theory that he might’ve just made a list of all the shit he wanted to destroy before he quit it for good).
The effects are a true spectacle here. They are incredible. Although, I still found visual effects that created major plot holes in the sense that it seems that the Earth is hollow. This is a shitty movie. That’s all I can say here.
I like John Cusack and the rest of the cast here. I can at least see that they are having fun, and that’s all this movie really boils down to. There isn’t a lot of merit to be thrown around.
When it comes down to it, I think 2012’s cult following will pick up soon, and people will enjoy it for what it is: a movie so bad it’s kind of fun. Not good, but fun-ish.
2/5
-Kyle A. Goethe
GOAT Film Reviews 