Roland Emmerich’s attempts to be the George Pal of modern blockbuster cinema here almost reach a Platonic ideal. Coming off perhaps his flattest and most utterly redundant film, 10,000 BC, Emmerich returns to his favourite framework, the end-of-the-world extravaganza, revolving around the supposed Mayan apocalypse, which is almost completely irrelevant, and thus fittingly exploitative in a Roger Corman-esque fashion, to the actual story, which involves solar flares destabilising the earth’s crust. Après nous, le Déluge. Heroic scientist Chiwetel Ejiofor, after being alerted by an Indian colleague (Jimi Mistry), alerts the world, but then tries with little success to inject a measure of humanism into a hastily contrived worldwide project to build arks to ride out the resulting colossal tsunamis, financed by the cash of rich assholes paying to save their own hides.
Ejiofor spends much of the subsequent movie combating Oliver Platt’s regulation government über-creep over who exactly to save and how, whilst the
Emmerich plunges in with such enthusiasm and splashy indulgence the film swiftly becomes a high comedy as it keeps trying to top itself. Emmerich uses the same stunts a few too many times (cars jumping expanding chasms; planes taking off and trying to fly through said chasms), but especially in the first cataclysmic LA-trashing spectacle, and in the breathless we’re-going-to-crash-into-Mt-Everest! finale, 2012 is delightful in its absurd invention. It’s easy to forget in the face of his utter lack of subtlety and piles of corn that Emmerich is actually one of the most skilled visual organisers and directors of mass chaos working Hollywood these days, and, like The Patriot and The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 is very good-looking even at its most utterly shallow. Even if, as clear progenitor Cecil B. DeMille once said of himself, the release of each of his films causes critical appreciation of the public’s intelligence to drop by half, this is a real distinguishing feature of Emmerich’s best films, as well as his ability to keep large casts of characters and converging plotlines in focus.
It helps that the cast is very good (George Segal, Thandie Newton and Stephen McHattie are in there too). Harrelson’s character, and performance, is particularly well-pitched for pure goofball entertainment, and Ejiofor and Cusack commit themselves with bewildering passion in the strangest circumstances. If Emmerich didn’t pay enough attention to the darkness inherent in the War of the Worlds scenario to make Independence Day little more than an expansive video game, his quotations of When Worlds Collide here have some archetypal force. The result, over-long and over-everything, is one of the year’s most satisfying pieces of claptrap, and will inevitably be reduced to inconsequentiality on television.
