MOVIE REVIEW: 2012

By Lawrence Griffin | gargoyle@flagler.edu

2012 features huge explosions of the earth as it falls apart. Roland Emmerich has pretty much created the be-all-end-all disaster film. Anything else he does will just seem like a regression now, because the scope of this film is just too huge for it to be topped again.

Through various scientific and geological manners, officials in the movie find out that the world will come to an end in 2012. The president (Danny Glover) even says point-blank, “The world as we know it will come to an end.”

These guys are not beating around the bush here.

So John Cusack, playing an absent-minded writer, is forced to leap into action and save the day as the world falls apart around him. His objective is simple: to take his family out of its California home and into a secret location given to him by a bonkers woodlands radio host (Woody Harrelson). To put it in laymen’s terms, craziness ensues, including driving a car through a building and out the other side as earthquakes destroy California, and commandeering a plane as the ground collapses beneath them.

Yes, the first half of the movie is insane. The only reason you don’t end up laughing at its ridiculousness is that it’s entertaining to watch. This film actually plays out more like a roller coaster than a movie with fast, immediately gratifying twists and turns every step of the way.

The second half is not quite as good, but I still ended up enjoying it. The story is generic and formulaic. There are a lot of those moments where the previously dysfunctional family ends up becoming closer together in the dire times of crisis and blah, blah, blah. It’s been done before, but to be fair, it isn’t done poorly. In fact, these aspects seemed downplayed in the face of the dilated special effects and the sheer magnitude of the disasters going on.