We interrupt our regular programming here at Biased Observer for a special report. It appears that the dead are returning to life as mindless zombies, and we are giving them millions of dollars to make movies.
I spent last night with Roland Emmerich
. In the cold light of day, it is obvious that Roland doesn't respect me and never did; nor can I respect myself anymore, but let's be honest: everyone tried to warn me, and I went ahead and did it anyway. Still, I'm taking time out to bitch about this... product,
2012, (I won't call it a film) because it so exactly pinpoints everything that is so wrong with movies today.
2012 somehow contrives to be worse than it is possible for it to be, considering the number of people and amount of money involved in making it -- so much worse that I find it hard to believe that Emmerich was not somehow involved in the script of
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. As such,
2012 presents a paradigm for this blog: henceforward I will think of it as the Anti-Movie, the antithesis of everything this blog is looking for in a film, the appearance of which heralds the beginning of cinema's Endtimes, the biggest, most chemical-tasting, coat your throat Twinky that turns out to be a cock in disguise ever to tempt an audience with the promise of a simple, infallibly compelling premise -- the cataclysmic destruction of planet Earth -- finally made possible on account of advances in CGI, and surely impossible to fuck up with so much money meaning so many cooks were on hand to make sure it didn't fall below a certain base level of moronism. But it does.
The only way it could have been worse is if Nicholas Cage had starred. There have been harbingers prior to this, costly commercial spectacles so empty they actually damage your character for having seen them, but
2012 is proof that the celluloid apocalypse has arrived. But do not mourn, movie-loving humanity: it doesn't mean that pictures and sound will never go together in a pleasing way again, just that, now we've had it demonstrated that there's no spectacle we can imagine that a computer can't make look (almost mostly) real on a tv screen, there's nowhere bigger and stupider left to go. We are almost reduced at this point to
having to tell
stories again, which means you can't just turn on your script-writing software, check the boxes for helicopter, mushroom cloud, car chase, bigger gun, too old for this shit, Nicholas Cage, I will find you,
Hell no! and then let 400 computer animators, taking a break from doing TV commercials, turn the spontaneous abortion that slides out of it into a three hour refutation of the laws of physics.
Hhmmm. I was all set for an extended rant, but, frankly, it's futile. The movie, that is. It wasn't worth three hours of my life to watch it, and certainly isn't worth the additional three it would take to give it the reaming it deserves, so I'm going to limit myself to a few remarks that only tickle the rim of this gaping money pit. First, nobody in it ever seems really all that upset by the death of most of humanity, most species of wildlife, and the planet itself, an artistic decision (to abuse a term beyond all meaning) likely based on the producers not wanting anyone to go away from their end of the world movie feeling depressed. The characters all banter Will Smithily as their planes lift off in the nick of time just as the world drops out from beneath their wheels for the tenth time in 45 minutes. From the time the earth first begins to split in earnest, it's nothing but impossibly close calls for John Cusack, over and over again. Emmerich even reproduces the magical gravity defying gap in the overpass bus jump from
Speed, the worst thing to happen to action films since Bruce Willis started outrunning shockwaves. God DAMN IT, surely the cardinal sin in any film, and an action film in particular, is to demonstrate to the audience that, no matter what happens to the rest of the world, John Cusack isn't going to die unless Scriptron 5000 decides that there is a 51% probablity that viewers will eat more popcorn if, at the very end, he must actually pay off that 'selflessly lay down your life for the good of all mankind' card set up for him early on, but that would be kind of a downer, wouldn't it, and not at all the feel-good kind of end of the world movie we were looking for. KILL HIM! Cusack's character, by the way, is a failed novelist whose critics have destroyed his career by labelling him a blind optimist, thus depriving him of the riches that are denied to such up-with-people, a-stupidly-fucking-heroic-gesture-can-fix-anything, happy-ending writers such as, oh, Roland Emmerich, and appears to have been presented to us as an earnest plea that there should be room in the Bunker or on the Ark for people who entertain while uplifting. This wonderful upliftingness is unaccountably referenced one hundred thousand times during the crisis by the obsessed with crap writing but also most dignified character in the movie, the handsome black end-of-the-world-ologist who falls for the black president's hot daughter, so that all future generations of progressively paler black people on the now overwhelmingly white planet will be really good looking and non-threatening to white folks, yo. We know he's the smartest guy in the film, by the way, because he tells Thandie Newton that he was a fat kid who used to be rewarded with an ice cream cone every time he read a book. Thandie ends up reading Cusack's crappy book because this guy
won't leave her the fuck alone about it, and when she admits to having found it a page turner, he then tells her it's more than that, it's one of the few books to have survived the apocalypse, and therefore suddenly one of the most important works of literature ever written. Just to rub that bleak thought in just a bit more, our memories flash back to the beginning of the film, when Cusack is seen reading
Moby Dick, which we can only hope and pray someone else thought to bring along on the voyage, since there was room for one fewer book in this asshole's totebag. I'm thinking he also preserved a digital copy of
Armageddon on his laptop.
Oliver Platt, meanwhile, gets to be the movie's villain by making the right moves every step of the way, refusing to panic people and working tirelessly to preserve a core group of humanity and its culture because that's all there's time for, only to have Black Jesus suddenly turn vegetable and lead a revolution with literally four minutes on the clock before the tidal wave hits to open the doors of the Ark and let more people on, which very nearly kills everyone. But Oliver Platt's the bad guy. Also, there's a bit where an enormous statue is seen being loaded onto the Ark. They couldn't have taken a digital photo of that thing and made room for, I don't know, Celine Dion?
I went into
2012 with rock bottom expectations and it still managed to piss me off. I've developed a chip on my shoulder where CGI is concerned, mostly because it appears to have become an acceptable substitute for writing, and despite Hollywood scripts passing through the hands of dozens of scriptwriters, there's rarely any evidence of any of them having stood anywhere near a word processor. Instead of CGI being just a tool in the film maker's kit, most effective when it is invisible, in the hands of the videogame designers who now produce our biggest blockbusters it is more often than not the whole show. And yet, I actually wanted to see
2012, for the CGI, and was content that it would be enough to make the thing enjoyable, because no matter how bad the script was, the sheer spectacle of seeing the world end was sure to be enough to put the thing over the top. And, to an extent, it actually is. Like the recent James Craig James Bond things, or
The Dark Knight, which are so fashion magazine advertisement slick they somehow manage to succeed on pure shiny sleekness alone when there is no way they should work at all,
2012 succeeds, sporadically, thanks to sheer force of money alone. But
unlike them,
2012 works
only in long shots,
when you can't make out any actors' faces or hear any of the dialogue. The unbelievable awfulness of the script continually drags it down, and, ultimately, impressive as the effects are, any episode of
Life After People, with the infinitely fewer resources at its disposal, has a bigger emotional impact simply because its script wasn't written on the back of a test audience's score card. Emmerich couldn't even be bothered disguising his disaster movie cliches and stock characters: Cusack's relationship with his son (and many of the effects shots) are stolen right out of Spielberg's
War Of The Worlds (2005); the rest of the script, including Morgan Freeman's president (here less convincingly portrayed by Danny Glover), is lifted wholesale from
Deep Impact(1998) and
When Worlds Collide (1951). I mean, it's
actionable. This would make more sense if
2012 belonged to Paramount, who own all three of these previously named and could, legally, recombine and re-sell these products any way they see fit, like Kellogs mixing Frosted Flakes and Special K to produce Frosted K, but
this Frosted K was generated by Sony.
There's a new phenomenon on the internet that has the potential to make a pleasurable viewing experience of
2012: fan-editing. Fan-editing involves amateur editors reworking existing feature films in an attempt to salvage the best elements and soften the worst.
The Phantom Menace has come in for special attention in this regard, but you can't make a silk purse out of a film directed by George Lucas after the original
Star Wars (no, he
didn't direct the second or third one). Often these fan cuts result in films that are two thirds the running time of the original and incorporate much of the footage that hit the cutting room floor when crack addicted test audiences lured in off the streets of L.A. indicated that the experience would be much improved by the addition of Johnny Depp, in eyeliner, smoking Gitanes and drinking absinthe, outrunning a nuclear shockwave at least once every ten minutes and getting up and walking away after a fall from a twenty storey building every twenty. Fan-editors have even been so bold as to attempt to make a watchable film out of
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, which I am here to tell you is just not possible.
2012, on the other hand, can be saved. You heard me right: I said it can be saved.
All that is necessary is for the script and characters to be cut out of it entirely, rendering it a two hour sequence of nothing but CGI aerial shots, like an episode of the BBC's
The Coast, except with the coast falling into the sea. The sad thing is that the most memorable image to come out of
2012 is, in fact, not in
2012, but the throwaway CGI gag pullback inspired by it that became the poster for
Zombieland, despite having nothing to do with the actual state of the world as depicted in that film. Emmerich, meanwhile, even managed to blow the pace of the grabber from the pre-release (and possibly pre-production?) teaser trailer, with the monk ringing the bell before the the tidal wave wipes out his mountaintop monastery. It was that bloody trailer that softened us up for this disappointment when it appeared a year or two ago, promising good, clean, end of the world thrills, with nary a hint of John Cusack driving a limousine through an office building to be seen anywhere.
George Romero, in his
Dawn Of The Dead, depicted mindless consumer zombies shambling through a shopping mall, apparently driven by some vestige of memory to continue in death the activity that had occupied them in life. More to the point these days would be a scene of zombies seated in a multiplex, gazing blankly up at the darkened screen,
2012 spelled out on the marquee outside. Or, in my case, Zombie Biased Observer at home six months later, remote control in hand, trying to push a DVD of
2012 into a broken and unplugged Blu Ray player. But, as they say, fool Zombie Biased Observer once: Brains. Fool Zombie Biased Observer twice:
BRAINNNSSSS!!!
I won't subject myself to another film with Roland Emmerich's name in the credits.
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