Monday, November 16, 2009

An Overwhelming “Buffet” – “2012”

There are only two questions that you need to ask for any doom-day movie: When it comes, where will you be and who will you be with? Anything else, like the special effects, humanity issues, religions, etc., are either pure technical things or things that could be covered by these two billion-dollar questions.

The profile of Roland Emmerich (a.k.a the director) actually decreased my desire to watch this movie: From “Independence Day” (1996), “Godzilla” (1998) all the way down to “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004) and “10,000 B.C.” (2008), it seems that the only thing increases is the ratio and tech level of those special effect shots in his movies. It was actually this poster and the name “John Cusack” (a.k.a the leading actor) that dragged me into the cinema.

The whole thing looks like a mixture of all disaster movies within the recent decade – You don’t need to be an expert to pinpoint the names like “Japan Sinks” (OK, if you haven’t watched this Japanese movie yet, go for it. I recommend the 2006 version.), “Titanic”, “War of Worlds” and Emmerich’s own “The Day After Tomorrow”. And of course, the Ark... It seems that Emmerich believed that if he could “extract” the classic scenes from all these movies and put them into one new movie, he could be able to create a more successful one. But what we see here is just an overwhelming “buffet” – we have everything, but we simply cannot digest.

Again a wrong role in a wrong movie for John Cusack. He could not even surpass Tom Cruise in “War of Worlds”. He should pick some more sophiscated roles to engrave his name onto some trophies.

And the writers of this movie simply “follow the rules”: Bad guys must be Caucasians; those supporting roles can find their peace in heaven so that the leading guy will reunite with his family and live happily ever after; and don’t forget these “popular” issues now:
1. BRIC: The fallen Christ in Brazil, Russian president and giant plane, the secret discovered by Indian scientist (and in India also), and China that makes the Arks.
2. Black U.S. president.
3. Brave U.S. firemen / firewomen
4. Tibet
etc.

Although, you should watch such a doom-day movie once every several yrs, just to think about those two billion-dollar questions, it’s good for your own sake.
P.S. Do you know the meaning of “Himalaya”?

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