Well, he did it again.
I am not an Emmerich hater, but you gotta give it to the guy. It looks like he goes to great lengths to ruin the expectations of anyone with a brain in the audience.
My problem with “2012″ is that it sends out a clear message that Emmerich and co. lack the cojones to go that extra mile to make his movies an enjoyable experience. Sure, “Independence Day” was cool and needed a hope filled ending, while “The Day After Tomorrow” got close to what I thought could extend his craft of destroying shit a little further.
And when I saw the full-length trailer for “2012″ I thought he was finally ready to take that next step. If you are still not understanding what I am getting at, here it goes in plain ENGLISH: I wanted him to just destroy everything, us humans included.
The movie is about the end of the world… the END of the WORLD!!! Get it? The world is supposed to END!!! It doesn’t get any simpler than that. And we get that in the movie… We get it a lot. But then he spirals down in an attempt at a dramatic third act where everybody knows each other, Russians are selfish, the US Government goes boo-hoo and half a million people get saved because through some miracle the government was able to build ships that protects everyone from the flood resulted in the whatthefuck is wrong with these people solar flairs and tectonic displacement horseshit.
It’s a flood… It’s not the end of the world, IT’S A FUCKING FLOOD! To make it even worse, the evil waters don’t do all that much damage and start to go back as the new highest point in the planet in AFRICA will be the start of the new human civilization. I am trying, but even my years of training can’t come up with words to describe how stupid everything is, and all these insanely retarded excuses to make a happy ending could have been solved by simply saying: OOPS, IT’S OVER! It would have been much more satisfying because the movie is (I love repeating this) THE END OF THE WORLD!
If you understand the molecule of a fart that comes close to story development, you would understand just how bad this is when it comes to being cohesive with the mood that had been set in the first, oh crap, 120 minutes of film, when you destroy everything, send out messages of dozens of different messages from dozens of different cultures that humanity’s days are being counted and you solve everything by making sure John Cusack gets back with Amanda Peet. WHAT?!!!
Then there’s casting choices. Black president: good idea, but not Danny Glover. Can somebody tell me what the hell Murtaugh is doing in the Oval Office? And then you get the worst joke ever when “John Kennedy” comes back to Washington in a tidal wave (I wish I could make shit like that up) to kill the While House with the Black President inside. It’s just BAD.
Then you get the president’s daughter and his scientific advisor. Both black, because hey, “maybe vee can make it ze new trend”, but both played by British actors in the worst roles of their lives. Cusack is Cusack, Peet is Peet (neutral here) and the only breath of fresh air is Woody Harrelson, but he dies so fast you forget he was ever there. And please, PLEASE, don’t ever cast Oliver Platt as a bad guy ever again… He is just too nice for that.
And if you expect me to talk about the effects, forget about it. It’s the very fucking least you can expect from a U$260 MILLION Dollar production.
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