Worse than the day after tommorow?
Worse than The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day and 10,000BC all rolled into one to be honest.
Independence Day was saved by some fun, tongue in cheek acting and comedy from Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum despite being horrendously vomit inducing at times. The Day After Tomorrow was an awful film but it still managed to illicit a modicum of very occasional mild suspense from me. 10,000BC was just plain silly but something of a visual treat at times even though, once again, it was pretty damn bad.
2012 takes this to whole new levels of awful awful acting, atrocious CGI, totally pointless plots full of holes, horrendous racial stereotyping, and does nothing more than engender a feeling of absolute futility that the world is coming to an end and there is f**k all you can do about it. Not because it is going to end due to any Mayan prophecy, oh no, but because you are amazed that anyone with any modicum of humanity can unleash a huge budget film this bad on an unsuspecting public only to have lots of them lap it up and think it was the most fantastic thing that they have ever seen.
Were all doomed.
Spoilers below, so try not to quote it or the colours wont match:
So this supposed absolutely stunning visual spectacle commences and one accepts that there will be quite a bit of pointless flimsy charachter development guff to get out of the way first. Not that I normally have a problem with charachter development; its just that Emmerich charachters tend to be so one dimensional and stereotypical that I am left wondering who precisely he is trying to develop them for. So you put up with the badly acted madman/conspiracy theorist nut who you know will die with a smile on his face when the apocalypse arrives. You accept the aspiring, broke part time writer, divorced from his wife who you know will have kissed and make up by the end of the movie. You tolerate the holier-than-thou US President who can do no wrong and elects to stay with his people in the metaphorical sinking ship rather than save his own skin. You put up with the slightly bewildered first daughter who you know will find a love interest in the young, hip, good looking intellectual type who knows what is happening and has done for some time but no-one really takes him seriously. And you can even manage to stomach the sneering, evil US government type who wants to seize power for himself and possess not a shred of humanity and solicits boos and hisses from the audience.
So when you have finished wading through this mire of badly directed stinking filth to get to the sweet smelling action scenes you are left horribly disappointed. The GCI is quite poor in places and we are left with cliche after cliche and what is, in effect, the same action scene repeated a multitude of times. I swear to the gods if the protagonist takes the car (that thanks to the bad GCI appears to have absolutely no mass and looks like a Matchbox toy), escapes Armageddon in his rear view mirror, gets to the airport, escapes the cracks forming at the rear of the aircraft, the aircraft takes off and does some further fleeing from the global apocalypse and then everyone cheers when they are away. But this does not just happen once, oh no! Emmerich must have felt he had hit on a masterpiece of filmmaking because he recycles this one boring action scene a multitude of times so much so that you really stop giving a damn what happens to anyone.
The film is so full of clichés that it ceases to be funny and starts to really annoy after an hour or so into the film. Every time our ham-handed directed begins to set one of these clichés up you can see it coming a mile away. Your initial reaction is one of "he wont really do it, will he? Hell find another way to get us out of this scene rather than resorting to that, wont he?" This is quickly replaced by painful moans and whimpers whenever yet another flimsy premise appears on-screen in order to facilitate something that Emmerich thinks either hasnt been done before or the audience wants to see more of. The second you find out the huge Ukrainian aircraft has a cargo bay full of cars you know they will be driving one out of the back in order to escape a fiery demise. The second you meet the US President you know he will sacrifice himself to save his people and his daughter. You know that the Sistine Chapel is going to crack right between the hands of God and Adam in The Creation of Adam. The list is endless, every single plot device in the film is a horrible cliché of some sort.
Normally I wouldnt be hyper critical of this sort of thing in an Emmerich film, it would be like criticising Michael Bay for poor narrative structure. They are action directors, they do what they do and they do it well, but dont expect anything other than cinema aimed at the lowest common denominator in the audience. However the action scenes in 2012 are a total waste of time, they are badly structured, poorly "directed" (if that is the term for computer rendered scenes) and have no pacing or suspense to keep us entertained. As I have previously mentioned a lot of the GCI itself is incredibly dodgy at times, especially the movement of vehicles and suchlike, and towards the latter stages of the film you are left wondering if they wasted all of their budget on the computer generated scenes and left nothing for the physically acted portions of the piece as they feel horrible, like a low budget made for TV film. Even the camera work makes you feel as though you are watching a cheap documentary or a vintage film that has not aged very well.
Pretty much everything about the film is to be avoided at all costs and unlike previous Emmerich films it has absolutely no small saving graces if you switch off your brain and try to enjoy the action.
