SKOC211

John Cusack and Lily Morgan in end-of-world thriller 2012


The ancient Mayans predicted that a world cataclysm would occur on the winter solstice in 2012, and so have enough conspiracy theorists to spur a swelling industry of doomsday books and TV shows. In the new thriller 2012, those lunar or just lunatic prophesies come true. "It's kind of galling," says a previously skeptical White House pooh-bah (Oliver Platt), "when you realize that the nutbags with the cardboard signs were right all along."


The nutbag with the $250 million budget is director and co-writer Roland Emmerich, who for all his deficiencies as a teller of stories and wrangler of actors can never be accused of thinking small. In Independence Day he had Martians attack Earth; in The Day After Tomorrow, global warming triggers an instant ice age. He is both the king of disaster porn and a sentimental élitist: his movies kill off billions of humans so that one family can get back together. Emmerich tinkers with Darwin's law so that it's the survival of the top-billed.


Chugging laboriously on several parallel tracks, the movie starts with noted scientist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) trying to get news of the bleak 2012 scenario to higher-ups, including President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover, the first African-American actor to play a U.S. Commander in Chief since Barack Obama assumed the post). Several billionaires are asked to contribute their fortunes to some mysterious endeavor that will save the world, or possibly just themselves. Meanwhile, on a peak in Yelllowstone Park, a crazy radio prophet (Woody Harrelson) is warning of an imminent Armageddon. And failed novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) is reunited with his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and two kids while they barely avoid the catastrophes befalling virtually everyone else on the planet. You'll quickly glean that Jackson's job is to be an ordinary guy who evolves into an end-of-days Messiah. (Can it be a coincidence that both the actor and his character have the initials J.C.?)


2012 — and by the way, how is the title to be pronounced? Two thousand twelve (like A Space Odyssey)? Twenty-twelve? Two-zero-one-two? — is a dead-serious hoot. In some scenes, when folks are spouting dewy end-of-days sentiments as if they're contending for the Couldn't Be More Noble prize, you'll need to stitch your lips together to keep from laughing out loud. The movie dawdles when straining to make the cardboard characters become flesh and blood. Why bother? That's not what we're here for; we want to see what the end of the world looks like, in case we're not around for the real thing.


So when a California governor in the Schwarzenegger mold goes on TV to proclaim, "The worst is over," we'd be disappointed if the whole state didn't immediately collapse in a crazy quilt of fault lines. In a disaster movie of the 2012 stripe, lines of complacent dialogue are like song cues in a musical: heralds of gigantic production numbers. The only difference is that instead of dancing chorines, 2012 offers orgies of destruction, some of which blithely recall 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.


If you can tamp down the "How dare they?" impulse, you'll find the movie's only scintillating scenes: the Curtis family's escape in a van through L.A. streets that cave in two seconds after Jackson careers over them, and a ride in a small plane that somehow flies between two downtown skyscrapers at the moment they collapse toward each other. Each boast effects work that is technically sophisticated, dramatically cheesy and kinetically irresistible. (These two thrillathon sequences can be found on Ain't It Cool News.) For all the logorrhea of the dialogue scenes, the movie can be brutally brisk when it wants to. Note how it dispenses with the complete works of Dan Brown in a few blunt strokes: the Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre, Vatican City is destroyed, Washington's masonry crumbles.


The closing credits announce that the movie was inspired in part by the book Footprints of the Gods, a pseudoscience tome that cites Charles Hapgood's 1958 theory of Earth Crust Displacement. (If you care, go to Wikipedia.) But the true inspirers of 2012 are the disaster movies — nearly all the disaster movies — that preceded it. There's the giant wall of water from The Poseidon Adventure, the apocalyptic ark from Evan Almighty, the panoramas of devastation and dad-and-son bonding from Spielberg's War of the Worlds and the notion of prominent people getting a ticket out of the disaster from both Dr. Strangelove and the 1951 film When Worlds Collide. That early sci-fi movie provides many of 2012's plot tropes, including the rioting of those meant to be left behind, the death of the richest, meanest man on earth and the ultimate salvation of cute kids and a pet pooch.


No, I didn't spill too much of the plot beans. Any sentient viewer will be able to predict every lumpy twist of this ludicrous, fitfully enjoyable movie. As for the original Mayan prediction, I have my suspicions that it's bogus, but I'm reluctant to blow off the whole idea. Get back to me on Dec. 22, 2012.


By Richard Corliss , Time

Darkstarr

My friends' comment:
"ifyou've seen Independence Day, Titanic, or any recent vintage of the well-worn disaster film genre, you will not be disappointed at all with any of 2012. Its 2.5 hour+ running time moves at a great clip, and there's enough science and pseudoscience running around to give the film a certain of-the-moment wonder and clarity. The many destruction sequences throughout the film are absolutely breathtaking to behold, and one wonders if Roland Emmerich starts every film imagining how he will destroy the White House. Like all of his other films (except for The Patriot) it has big names but no huge names and really is a blast to watch. It has just the right balance of action and melodrama, often, as with all good films of this genre, in the same scene. The audience I watched it with was laughing and cheering throughout, and I'm sure it will be the definitive event movie of the holiday season. "
I cannot wait for this blockbuster!

seeker

A NASA scientist has condemned the doomsday film "2012" and launched a web site, "Ask an Astrobiologist," to quell the fears it is raising.


The film, now showing in the U.S., is the latest and most high-profile public airing of an ancient Mayan prediction that a world cataclysm will occur on the winter solstice in 2012. There have been many books and TV shows on the theory but "2012" has had a much greater impact, creating widespread public fear that the prediction may be correct.


Dr. David Morrison, a senior scientist at NASA's Astrobiology Institute, has become so concerned that he decided not to remain silent.


"Two years ago, I got a question a week about it," said Morrison.


"Now I'm getting a dozen a day. Two teenagers said they didn't want to see the end of the world, so they were thinking of ending their lives," he added.


Morrison attributed the general fear to the fact that several items have become conflated into one mega-myth. One is the persistent Internet rumor that a planet called Nibiru, or Planet X, is going to crash into the Earth.


Then there is the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, suggesting that the Mayans knew something we don't. Finally, end-of-the-worlders have seized upon the publicity about the 2012 date to push their claims the end of the world is near.


Morrison said Nibiru was a name in Babylonian astrology sometimes associated with the god Marduk. The claims that Nibiru was a planet and was known to the Sumerians were just imagination.


He said IRAS, the NASA Infrared Astronomy Satellite, which carried out a sky survey for 10 months in 1983, discovered many infrared sources, but none of them was Nibiru or Planet X or any other object in the outer solar system.


He said, if signs of a new object in space turned out to be not real, or not a planet, then it was not heard about again. If it was real, it would not be called Planet X. Therefore, the so-called Planet X did not exist.


Morrison said the great majority of the many photos and videos on the internet purporting to be of Nibiru were of some feature near the Sun, apparently supporting the claim that Nibiru had been hiding behind the Sun for the past several years. These were actually false images of the Sun caused by internal reflections in the lens, often called lens flare.


He said people could identify them easily by the fact that they appeared diametrically opposite the real solar image, as if reflected across the center of the image. This was especially obvious in videos, where, as the camera moved, the false image danced about always exactly opposite the real image. Similar lens flare was a source of many UFO photos taken at night with strong light sources such as streetlights in the frame.


Morrison also dismissed claims the government knew about Nibiru but kept it a secret to avoid panic. He said there were many objectives of government, but they did not include keeping the population at ease.


He said social scientists had pointed out that many of the concepts of public panic were the product of Hollywood, while in the real world people had a good record of helping each other in time of danger.


"I think everyone also recognizes that keeping bad news secret usually backfires, making the issue even worse when the facts finally come out. And in the case of Nibiru, these facts would come out very soon indeed," he added.


He said, even if it wanted to, the government could not keep Nibiru a secret. If it were real, it would be tracked by thousands of astronomers, amateurs as well as professionals. These astronomers were spread all over the world.


On why the Mayan calendar says the world will end in 2012, Morrison said calendars existed to keep track of the passage of time, not predict the future.


He said ancient calendars were interesting to historians, but they could not match the ability people had today to keep track of time, or the precision of the calendars currently in use.


"The main point, however, is that calendars, whether contemporary or ancient, can not predict the future of our planet or warn of things to happen on a specific date such as 2012," said Morrison.


"I note that my desk calendar ends much sooner, on Dec. 31, 2009, but I do not interpret this as a prediction of Armageddon. It is just the beginning of a new year," he said.


Answering a question from a school boy that all his school friends were telling him that all were going to die in the year 2012 due to a meteor hitting Earth, Morrison said his friends were wrong.


He said the Earth had always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits were very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.


But today, NASA astronomers were carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit, said Morrison.


"We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs," Morrison stressed.


Xinhua

zoney

The end of the world is more fasinating than scary to me, its not about to happen yet and I think it will be a slow long end. Anyway, the movie rocks!

breadwinner

Who dare say it for sure that Feb.21, 2012, is Not a doomsday.