Nicholas Thurkettle

2012
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser
Producers: Harald Kloser, Mark Gordon, Larry J. Franco
Stars: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Tom McCarthy, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Liam James, Morgan Lily, Zlatko Burić, Beatrice Rosen

I lost count of the number of times characters in 2012 ran in from somewhere off-camera and exclaimed “You have to see this!” I didn’t like this movie but I am impressed by it, since it so expansively delivers on that exact carny sideshow pitch Hollywood has been honing since Jaws. Month after month and year after year they promise spectacular violence and catastrophe enjoyed from the safe vantage point of a comfortable multiplex chair. It’s less about entertainment then a sense of destiny created by its own awesome ridiculousness: good or not, you HAVE to see this.

The movie exists as a kind of evolutionary endpoint for Earth-centric cataclysm as a big-screen activity. After a first act consisting of ominous portents, grim world leaders Preparing For the End, and Ordinary Mortals played by famous actors laying out their various subplots, the movie merrily proceeds to spend two hours glamorously and thoroughly destroying the Mother Planet with all the glee of a kid torpedoing toy boats in the bathtub.

Buildings crack and tumble, oceans rise, continents shift, background extras scream and perish by the billions, and the boys in the effects department punch up what must take the prize for the largest fireball any human ever outran in slow motion. Who else would direct this deathstravaganza but Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow’s own Roland Emmerich, a filmmaker who has never had anything more sophisticated to say to moviegoers than “BOOOOM!”
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