2012 Reviews

2012 is a great movie!!!
I love this film!!!

I have a thing for disaster movies and Roland always does his best. Maybe not as good as The Day After Tomorrow, but surely brilliant. 4/5

As far as End of the World movies go this one is the real deal. See it on the big screen though, it won't be the same at home.

Let's be honest...this movie was worth the three dollar rental fee if only to watch California fall off the face of the earth. Any movie that can show me the subsequent elimination of California, Vegas, and almost every politician gets at least sixe stars in my book.

As far as the plot line...well, who actually rented this one for the interesting story? 2012 is stocked full of amazing special effects and about a million edge-of-your-seat moments that make you want to just get to the happy ending already!

For those more detail oriented people that will feel the urge to ask questions (such as, "How is it that everyone speaks American English everywhere on the face of the planet?" or "Just exactly how slow does the largest pyroclastic flow in history take to travel 100 yards?") it may do some good to simply put your brain on pause for this one and look at the pretty apocalypse.

The last four months of 2009 were mostly happy when it comes to movies with ratings below PG-13/12A. Food from the sky, a chance to see two Pixar classics again, a lie to change everything in a world where lies or religion don't exist, lots of happy romance going on, a magical door that leads to a world beyond your wildest imagination, big friendly creatures playing with a little boy, an anime franchise revival, a last chance to memorise the King of Pop, a famous Christmas tale being awesome-fied, woodland creatures having fun, a friendly retro planet getting discovered and two royals/frogs keeping a currently-disrespected company alive.
And then we got 2012.



There have been many mentionings of the world ending last year. Terminator Salvation was post-apocalyptic, the Sun was the main target of destruction (WTF) in Transformers: Revenge of the Perverts, the machines and Stitch Punks in 9 were the world's only inhabitants after the attack, the Surrogates almost caused an end to all humanity, Ricky Gervais lied in one scene about the world ending in The Invention of Lying and there was something to do with the world ending in the upcoming Sherlock Holmes. But this disaster settles all of that. And boy, is it a disaster.

2012 friggin' sucked! It's just some propaganda designed to scare people into believing that the world really will end in late 2012. It's no surprise that this was released on Friday the 13th; it's just the right time to be one of the unlucky ones to see such a horrible movie! My predictions for this movie's suckage were obviously correct; I created pictures and videos about how bad it will be, and I even did some of the paragraphs in this review days before I had the chance to finally post it! Damn you, Emmerich! Why did you have to make a crappy movie so visually spectacular?! Besides, the idea isn't the only thing about this movie that made me laugh. That's right, it's also a comedy by mistake. I expected the reviews for this film to be horrible, but they weren't the worst! It appears that some critics loved its campiness and found it to be a guilty pleasure. Even Roger Ebert loved it! But that's what you'd expect from the guy who preferred the third Mummy film to the recent Star Trek. According to The Independent, at the end of the special screening of this movie, everyone applauded. Or did they? Well, the Sony twats added a recorded sound effect of an applause and lied that the applause was real, when all the people just walked out and only used their hands to get themselves up off of the seat and carry their belongings! What is the world coming to?



In this movie, the Mayan calendar proves that 11:11 AM (where?), December 21st, 2012, the year of the London Olympics, the movie version of Marvel's The Avengers and the 200th anniversary of the 1812 Overture, will be the beginning of the world's apocalypse, and it's obvious why no-one's celebrating Christmas. And guess what? In real life, the Mayans said that the world will come to an end of a cycle, not come to an end, period! I'm guessing that someone was lost in translation. In the beginning, it shows evidence during 2009 to 2012. The first two bits of damage when 2012 comes are a huge crack and a random car explosion. We don't see why - maybe it was a bomb. If this movie could be any more screwed up, it'd be an invisible terrorist. They even mention a mass suicide because of the prediction -- does Roland want that to happen to everyone? Now every movie has to have main characters, but this is one of those movies where you just have to pick anyone you want. In this film, it's a mock of Barrack Obama played by Danny Glover (there was also a mock of Arnold Schwarzenegger), a scientist played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and John Cusack in a role which pretty much rips off that of Tom Cruise in the remake of The War of the Worlds. Wait, another rip-off? Crap!

Now I don't know if his character Jackson Curtis is really a character, because his importance is for writing a critically bashed book called "Farewell Atlantis". At least this has more character than The Day After Tomorrow. But moving on, awesome special effects destroy America and Curtis' family have to struggle to survive. They go places for research and shelter in different ways of transport; driving, flying, running. On their journey to the modern arks in China, they meet up with a guy who is played by the guy from Zombieland and accidentally shows off his butt crack before his demise, a friend of theirs and a bunch of Russian stereotypes including a guy named Yuri and a member of the family named Sasha. Gee, does that sound familiar at all? Later, they join in with a lot more people and a bunch of jungle animals trying to survive to go into the arks while much more random disasters happen, including a destruction of the White House that's more awesome than the laser destruction in Independence Day. How many people will survive? Can this movie get any cheesier? Will the Master of Disaster be able to make another disasterous disaster movie? Well, this is actually his last one. Hallelujah. Imagine if he still made disaster movies - if the buzz about the asteroid XF11 hitting Earth in 2028 carried on and he decided to make a movie about that, I'd wish the asteroid hit me immediately.



The special effects are needless to say kick-ass, but everything else is just suck-ass. I didn't think John Cusack goofed up on his career in Igor! The special effects, though, are just overblown as well and result in complete CGI porn that gives the finger to logic. But if you want real CGI porn, watch the Speed Racer movie! The acting is decent, but sometimes annoying. Every bad movie has cheesiness, and you'd find a lot of that in this movie. The whole thing rips off many action scenes like ones from Deep Impact, even though I haven't seen it yet. And Yuri? He's one of the reasons why this movie made me laugh. He sounds like a Russian Sylvester Stallone! And guess what? The end of the movie isn't the end of the story. For we have long to wait until the grand finale, because Roland Emmerich had thought up a TV series based on this movie that takes place in 2013! And you thought "Back to the Barnyard" was bad enough. Now if you're guessing how long this is, let me give you a hint - I saw 9 and Zombieland on the same day on November 1st. They are each a minute close to 80, one before and the other after. If you watch them on the same day too but stop watching on the last minute of the end credits, guess what length you're going to get?




AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

The marketing was crazy - when I went on the London train to go and see the special preview of Astro Boy, 2012 was advertised on the London IMAX. A poster for the film also had a cameo in Zombieland. No joke. At the cinema I go to there was a poster board so huge that the ones for This Is It, A Christmas Carol, The Princess and the Frog and Sherlock Holmes had to stay behind. I even heard radio advertising for the premiere and saw a poster at the cinema persuading the audience to buy tickets for the film. I saw plenty of viral marketing and promotion for the CGI disaster bonanza, which says the world will end due to something called "Planet X" (*insert Duck Dodgers reference here*), and that marketing was so popular that a lot of people became dumbasses and believed that the apocalypse is real! A Nasa scientist, named David Morrison, got 1,000+ notices from frightened little teenage babies who threatened to commit suicide from viewing 2012's viral websites! They often added a friggin' notice at the end of the trailers and the bottom of the posters to scare the living daylights out of even more people by telling them to find out the "truth" and Google up '2012'! What were they thinking?! It's as if the creators are trying to ask people, "Go see this movie and believe in the apocalypse of 2012 or else you can come and kiss our asses."



Now, 2012 isn't the only end of the world prediction that got a movie. Search on the IMDB for Y2K. And if I had to compare this with The Asylum/Faith Films' 2012 Doomsday, which came out in early 2008, I'd have to say that 2012 Doomsday sucked the most. The acting was terrible, the visual effects were mediocre, the film was short and the dialogue was rubbish. It was way too religious because God was mentioned too many times. 24 times including "Lord", to be exact. It tries so hard to be friendly to Christians, but ends up pleasing Satan. And I bet you know how they say "OMG". That's right, "Oh my Gosh!" If you've ever seen the film Dragonwyck, you'd notice about seven uses of the word 'God' from a young female in the last half, but this is ridiculous! Even the plot is stupid! The main characters are just randomly picked; you wouldn't know who the hell the film is about!

Even the whole thing ends with the gang finding out that birth will keep them safe, and they're lucky because they've brought an abandoned pregnant woman from Mexico with them. So everyone and everything gets burned except the Mayan temple and the characters. This is a highly religious film, yet they didn't have any black people in it! And do you want to know the rest of the ball-sucking? The Asylum recently released another 2012 film as a rip-off of Roland's movie - 2012 Supernova, which doesn't even have much to do with 2012! The character development is worse in that film and it feels like more of a sci-fi action film rip-off, and the whole thing has a happy ending where the world stays alive! It's like a movie where a giant octopus tries to save the Titanic! Which actually happened in a movie! And you wondered why I saw 2012...



There's also a similar movie idea I've heard of by Michael friggin' Bay named 2012: The War for Souls, probably the reason why 2012 Doomsday was created, which hasn't had any recent news because the project was cancelled, praise the Lord. Just imagine, tons of unnecessary gay sex jokes, all the goofiness of Armageddon, everything exploding and burning and an end to the movie where the whole world explodes! That would be pure hell.

Columbia, how could you? Late in 2009 you gave us District 9 (TriStar), Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Zombieland and Michael Jackson's This Is It, and now you want to help the director of 10,000 BC try to persuade people into believing that the world is going to end? I want to go up to that Torch Lady, steal her torch and use it burn her face off. If you think we're this fooled, then I'm not seeing any of your movies on the big screen ever again. To anyone reading this, do not trust the advertising. Do not waste your money or a time of your life that's shorter than Avatar and thankfully shorter than Fame. Do not get attracted by the VFX or the end song that's so amazing that it beats that of Titanic or Armageddon. Do not see this movie, unless you enjoy campy eye candy. It's basically a disaster that makes The Twilight Saga: New Moon seem like nothing to worry about! For if you do see it, you're getting a disaster in three meanings; the death of the world, the death of cinema, and the death of your brain cells. I had wasted not only 158 minutes of my life, but 34 precious pounds off of my money, and you won't believe how much I regret doing so. I also got a pain in my backside from sitting for too long, so I had to walk around like a hunchback for a short while! So yeah, it's crap, and I don't give a turd if you enjoyed it or treated it as a tribute to the campy disaster flicks of the past, because I kept my brain inside my head throughout the entire movie. But I have to give the movie some credit for making me laugh by accident and not being so Bay-ish, and I admit that 2012 Doomsday and 2012 Supernova are no 2012.

Jackson Curtis: No matter what happens, we'll all stay together.

As scientists begin to fear the end of the world, one man tries to keep his family safe from disaster. Jackson Curtis (Cusack) begins to listen to the wild theories of Charlie Frost (Harrelson) and he realizes that everything Charlie speaks about on his radio program is coming true. Also at the same moment Dr. Adrian Helmsley (Ejiofor) is the geologist who begins to realize that the end of the world may be happening faster then he originally predicted. Now with the impending disaster about to strike it is a battle of survival and people are willing to do all that it takes to survive.

Adrian Helmsley: The moment we stop fighting for each other, that's the moment we lose our humanity

From the way I saw the commercials they labelled this as a John Cusack film but he was not able to pull off the level of performance I have seen from him in the past. His lines were monotone and sound like the same record scratching to look for the next good thing to play. Cusack failed to grip during the emotional family moments, the tender moments where he was supposed to make it seem to his children like everything was going to be ok. Perhaps it felt this way because these films are way to predictable as far as knowing what to expect next. Cusack perhaps could not deliver the emotional fervor because we knew that the next scene would feature the same sort of idea.

I however was pleasantly surprised at the performance of Chiwetel Ejifor, he played Adrian on a human level, he was not racing against an ash cloud or massive tsunamis to save his children, but he was the man who had to keep this catastrophe a secret and watch as the people developed a sense of hysteria and a will to do what it took to survive. He has the right idea about restarting humanity but just like every other redundant disaster flick there was one man who felt he had authority and whatever he said is what happened. All though through the commonplace of events one could understand that Adrian was in fact human and was trying to keep humanity alive and alienating people because of status and class was not the way to go about doing it.

After looking into the surprised reaction and sheer terror of these characters and deciding whether or not the circumstance that took place are believable or not one must then do a little bit of research to discover whether or not the science beyond 2012 is actually realistic. The Earth Crust displacement is a real theory. If you want to read more about it check out this website here www.skrause.org/writing/papers/hapgood_and_ecd.shtml. There is evidence gathered by Professor Charles Hapgood on this theory but he could not narrow it down and say that it would be taking place in the year 2012. The theory states the earth is supposed to move on its axis which in the movie caused the fault lines to create massive mid ocean tsunamis which had enough force to destroy land for miles. My advice to anyone who likes science is to watch the film and then look into the theories yourselves, because I don’t know all that much and so I decided to link to a page that has more sources then I can possibly give you.

Now if you want a film where you watch the devastation of mankind where you can predict the outcome from mile away or you are looking for action that is way beyond anything I hope to ever see in my lifetime then 2012 is your film, it is explosive with CGI and the destruction of the cities is rather action packed. Take note Governments and build these “arks” and everyone begin the trek to China in early 2012 because The date of December 21st may not be when the world as we know it comes to end. If you want to believe in the 2012 theory that is.

Take away the over the top visuals and there is really no reason to watch these films, all these big name actors hired to play filler roles to help build the realism was waste of budget money. My advice, rent this film for a 3 hour filler gap of time, if you are completely and utterly bored beyond belief then take a 10-20 minute walk and rent this from your local store, oh and turn on the surround sound if you have it, other than that I say skip this one entirely.

Sources
www.skrause.org/writing/papers/hapgood_and_ecd.shtml.

As many have said, great special effects. But little, very little, respect for reality. I suppose it is possible to make a (good) movie about the end of time based on actual physics laws. It's ok to cheat once or twice, but not to treat the viewer as a complete stupid.

又是一部災難片，引用馬雅預言地球將在2012年毀滅，不過片中主角總是神勇，好幾個場面看起來就是不可能任務，一如美式電影般，主角總是那個最後拯救大家的英雄。 若從地球毀妙角度來看，我們真的有能力改變嗎？所謂的諾亞方舟(飛船) 真的就能抵擋一切？人性終究險惡，無法不自私，不可能人人都有大愛，我想若那天來臨，人性面會有多醜陋，卻誰也無法埋怨。

I had no interest in seeing this film at all for two reasons: because it was a film about the end of the world in 3 years time and I hate Roland Emmerich for the films he has done in the past. One night very recently, I just decided to watch it because it looked entertaining and I wanted to check out what it would be like if it does end. When I did watch 2012, I was both blown away but also mildly disappointed and sort of relieved as well. The visual effects in the film were absolutely magnificent. The Best Visual Effects category is a tough one this year because there have been a lot of action/science fiction/fantasy films with amazing visual effects and I reckon that 2012 will nominated for it alongside Star Trek and Avatar. It will be absolutely amazing on Blu-ray especially with a big screen. Where I was disappointed was that it didn't have enough specific detail regarding the Mayan Calendar or the Mayan's themselves and because of this, the film lacked the believability. It just felt like a random end to the world. At the start of the film it was very realistic regarding what could happen but when the disasters came in, it fell into the science fiction genre and I fell for the enjoyment of the action within it.


I have never been a big fan of John Cusack but his performance in 2012 was absolutely brilliant! I really liked his character. His character is a lot like Ray Ferrier in War Of The Worlds. Only difference was Cusack was great but Cruise was dreadful. Jackson Curtis is a middle aged man who is divorced from his ex-wife and has a son called Noah and a daughter called Lilly. Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance as Adrian Helmsley was good as well. His performance wasn't as good as John Cusack's but wasn't far off. Amanda Peet wasn't good at all as Kate Curtis. She was a good mum but I didn't think her role was as serious or has heroic as Cusack's or Ejiofor's performances were.


After the ultimate disaster that was 10,000B.C., I had absolute pure hate for Roland Emmerich for making such a crap film. After watching 2012, it is definitely Emmerich's most successful film so far but I still don't like him very much. I still can't forgive him for bringing us 10,000B.C.! 2012 is an absolutely typical Roland Emmerich film. He usually does disaster films and I think that this is pretty much the only disaster film that didn't turn out to be a disaster. The action sequences were brilliantly directed but some of the non-action scenes weren't very good. The script was ok at times but it did have its flaws like a lot of films like this have.
Overall, 2012 is a very enjoyable action-thriller than nobody should be afraid to see because it is totally filled with science fiction action. 2012 is Roland Emmerich's best film so far and he is starting to get back on track with making entertaining films.