Film review: 2012

If I had to choose a single defining word for the film 2012 it would be “EXCESS”. Yes, in caps and everything.

As Roger Ebert says, 2012 is “the mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family)”. At approximately two and a half hours it’s bloated, unwieldy and needs a heavy edit.

After the grand success that was our viewing of Big Trouble in Little China, Neil and I decided to watch another bad movie. And what could be badder than 2012? With disaster after disaster after disaster, it was guaranteed to have cars being chased by the ground falling away and at least a couple of explosions. And when it comes to those qualifications, it doesn’t disappoint.

John Cusack plays a likeable everyman trying to save his family (that is, his children, ex-wife played by Amanda Peet and her boyfriend Gordon), Chiwetel Ejiofor is Chief Science Advisor to the President (Danny Glover) and Woody Harrelson is the crazy guy/conspiracy theorist in Yellowstone who actually does know exactly what’s going on. Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton and a LOT of other people are in this movie.

So what exactly happens? In a nutshell, solar flares are getting so intense they’re causing the centre of the earth to liquefy (or something). Ejiofor’s character finds out what’s going on, tells the President and then a huge fundraiser starts where rich people are being charged 1 billion Euros per person for a spot on an ark (I’m not kidding). Flash forward to 2012 when all hell breaks loose and the rest of the movie is about the main characters trying to make it to the ark.

I wasn’t expecting to learn anything from this movie, to experience any real growth or to feel moved by it. But I also didn’t expect to be editing in my head (or out loud, as Neil might say) for most of it either. There was too much of almost everything. Did we need three scenes of parents and children saying goodbye? Or multiple scenes of planes trying to take off while the ground is falling away? Entire characters could have been cut out, like Gordon, and the movie would have been the same, if not better. They could have trimmed an hour off the film and it would have been just about perfect.

At the same time , the first hour was a lot of fun. It was exactly what I was hoping for in an action movie and I loved it. So if I can make a recommendation it would be to watch the first hour and then decide if you want to watch the rest. And in the meantime, check out this reaction from the crying wife over at cryingwife.com.

Buy 2012 from Amazon.com
Buy 2012 from Amazon.ca

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