John Cusack

If director Roland Emmerich had written "Aquarius," the lyrics would've gone something like this: "When the moon is in the Seventh House/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then you can forget peace among the planets -- it's time to die, a million different ways!"

 

Emmerich's singularly destructive interests as a filmmaker, as seen in "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," are nothing compared to the Vegas buffet of apocalyptic scenarios littering "2012," soon to flood the multiplexes with the cinematic equivalent of nacho pump-cheese until we're stuck there, in line at the concession counter, gasping out our last bits of unnecessary exposition. I quite enjoyed the experience, at least the first five or six hours of it. "2012" is not simply the last disaster movie you ever need to see. It's the last movie you ever need to see.

Objectively considered, it is pretty dire, both in its narrative speculations (owing to the Mayan calendar foretelling a dicey near-future for us all) and in its merry defiance of every reasonable standard of storytelling quality. But film, like film criticism, concerns more than mere objective truths. "2012," which samples everything from "Earthquake" to "The Perfect Storm" to "The Towering Inferno" to the Bible, will appeal to the baser instincts in anyone who lapped up Emmerich's schlocktastic "10,000 B.C." Which makes one of us, at least.

So, the people we're supposed to care about: John Cusack plays a struggling writer and part-time limo driver whose ex-wife (Amanda Peet) is dating a plastic surgeon (Tom McCarthy) who has a pilot's license. This comes in handy indeed, once these uneasily blended family units get together and skedaddle out of L.A. just as L.A. is doing its big deathbed scene.

Meantime, the president (Danny Glover) and his daughter (Thandie Newton) and the president's oily adviser (Oliver Platt, who comes pre-oiled) are being briefed by the only man on the planet who knows what's going on with the sun and the neutrinos and the Earth's core and the heating and flooding problems and the shaking and the waves and the drowning everywhere. The scientist is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who periodically throws the movie out of whack simply because he's such a good actor.

Behind the wheel of his limo, Cusack's character outruns an earthquake clear across Hollywood, which makes for a pretty good sight gag. (The special effects are on the B-minus/B-plus level of impressive, which makes them more fun, somehow.) The surgeon, in a small plane carrying the sympathetic ones who will never die, outruns a quake of his own at the Vegas airport. Up in Yellowstone National Park, Woody Harrelson plays a tetched radio host who knows what's coming and who has no interest in outrunning anything. In an Emmerich film this makes him both more and less than human.

No one cares more about our planet than Emmerich, who wrote the "2012" script with Harald Kloser. He cares because he has so many ways to get rid of it, to level its landmarks, ix-nay its inhabitants and erase entire continents, even. As a moralist he is true-blue: He'll slaughter digitized extras by the thousands, as the Earth's core heats up and the floodwaters rise and the earthquake fissures fish, but he'll devote several minutes of screen time to a dislikable little dog's fate in the face of the biggest tsunami ever, just as it's about to cream Mount Everest. The script is so brazen about its cliche-deployment, you half-expect O.J. Simpson's firefighter from "The Towering Inferno" to show up and save a kitten.

Then again, by this point in what the old folks call the "story," the canine rescue is no big whoop; we've already seen it all, twice. "2012" goes on so much longer than it should. Even its third-act endlessness becomes sort of entrancing. You can keep your Michael Bay, with his Transformers. For visual noise by the ton, Emmerich is my kind of hack, the pluperfect blend of leaden self-seriousness and accidental-on-purpose self-satirist.

 

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"2012" Movie Trailer

Never before has a date in history been so significant to so many cultures, so many religions, scientists, and governments. 2012 is an epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors

 

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MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense disaster sequences and some language).

Running time: 2:38.

Cast: John Cusack (Jackson Curtis); Chiwetel Ejiofor (Adrian Helmsley); Amanda Peet (Kate Curtis); Oliver Platt (Carl Anheuser); Thandie Newton (Laura Wilson); Tom McCarthy (Gordon Silberman); George Segal (Tony Delgatto); Danny Glover (President Wilson); Woody Harrelson (Charlie Frost).

Credits: Directed by Roland Emmerich; written by Harald Kloser and Emmerich; produced by Kloser, Mark Gordon and Larry Franco. A Columbia Pictures release.

 

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