James Absolon explains how this Pope-themed film, despite its risky premise, works
Alex Pollard reviews Hollywood's biopic of the controversial Margaret Thatcher
It's the end of the world all over again, as Roland Emmerich returns with another special effects-filled orgy of destruction, this time on a grander scale than ever before.
Pity he didn't spend as much time on the script as he did thinking up the various modes of annihilation brought vividly to life here – earthquakes, floods, volcanoes.... basically it's The Day After Tomorrow 2: The Day After That. If you watched that film and thought a) not enough landmarks got destroyed, b) the character development was a little bit unpredictable for your tastes, and c) any film is improved by a cute dog walking a tightrope, then you'll love 2012.
If, as the god-awful cute dog scene would suggest, the film is in fact a comedy, then that scuppers the supposedly serious emotional scenes, in which characters realise the strength of humanity, discover what it means to be a family and say that they love each other. Perhaps Emmerich decided to make them deliberately predictable, ham-fisted and schmaltzy, and the whole film is one big joke. In which case he's a subversive genius. The strongest feeling aroused in me was one of pity, for a group of talented actors, including John Cusack, Thandie Newton and Chiwitel Ejiofor, who try their best to create characters worth watching, complete with monologues scraped together from all the worst speeches in disaster film history, only to fail miserably.
It's utterly devoid of suspense, devoid of emotional engagement, devoid of anything remotely interesting at all. This wouldn't even matter if the action scenes were as spectacular as the trailers had indicated. But no, even the destruction is staggeringly tedious. The special effects themselves, the bedrock of the film, seem to have progressed little since The Day After Tomorrow. They're not better, there's just more of them, chucked onto the screen artlessly. The first major FX sequence, in which Los Angeles collapses whilst Cusack and family drive through the falling debris in a limo, is so tacky that not even the greatest FX in the world could make it believable. Besides, Emmerich seems infatuated by the idea of Earth cracking up and sliding into the abyss – an effect which is barely exciting the first time, let alone the 20th.
Things start to liven up in the last half hour, as the film decides to be The Poseidon Adventure, and Cusack has to save the day with an underwater task that looks about as difficult and life-threatening as a Crystal Maze game. But by this point you are long past caring, since this awe-inspiringly dull film feels like it's about 2012 minutes long.
It's not that Roland Emmerich's film-making skills have deteriorated in the past five years; after all, all his films are essentially the same. It's just that I have grown up. If I was still 14 years old (which the rest of the audience seemed to be) this would probably be the greatest film I'd ever seen. If, however, you think the sight of a giraffe being airlifted through the Himalayas is both stupid and physically impractical, you'll wish the ground could open up and save you from this trash.
You must log in to submit a comment.
