My first thought was, “This is Roland Emmerich’s Inland Empire.  Now he has to switch genres altogether.”

I meant to blog about this days ago (because I saw the film 9 days ago) but sometimes it’s better to wait.  I hardly ever write about films anyway.  I’ve seen just about every entry in the category of Disaster Porn and 2012 was definitely near the top. was pretty great–better by far than The Day After Tomorrow and better also than Independence Day, which was obscenely patriotic and devolved into the silliness you get when you cast Will Smith and let him play his persona.

Speaking of Will Smith, he must have been busy.  So too must have been George Clooney, Nicolas Cage, Don Cheadle, Jeremy Irons, Ian McKellen, Shadoe Stevens, Bobby Trendy, Joan Cusack, Charo and everyone else you’d think would be cast as an action hero prior to arriving at John Cusack.  He’s iffy.  You need someone with absolutely no appeal beyond classic inoffensiveness to play an Everyman.

2012 is grim.  Everybody dies, in concentric circles of destruction that engulf the earth.  Only about 350,000 homo sapiens survive the end of the world.  Woody Harrelson (who is everywhere at this moment) has a shoddily written but nicely concluded cameo, as an Alex Jones-type conspiracy theorist radio host who dies when a pyroclastic cloud explodes out of the supervolcano that is Yellowstone National Park.

This is obligatory, but the characterization, dialogue and premise’s requisite pseudoscientific jargon (neutrinos excited by solar activity are heating the earth’s core) are abysmal.  And some subplots, particularly the jazz-musician-dad-at-sea, get revisited for a few seconds every half hour, which is seriously piss-poor narrative structure.  OK, that said, 2012 is great because absolutely none of those things matters one bit.  The cataclysmic destruction of Los Angeles is outstanding on both the micro and macro scale and seriously fucking scary; it’s like sunrise ambulance/truck chase scene at the beginning of Terminator 3 writ large.

Hawaii on fire by night is rad.  The lead up to and end of Las Vegas is pretty good, too.  Not so much Rio or India; although it’s nice to acknowledge that the Third World exists to be destroyed also, they kind of phoned it in there.

The idea that the end of the world is happening so fast that even the cabal of rich and powerful people who’ve had years to prepare for it are caught off guard is really kind of jarring.  Ten arks fitted for 100,000 passengers each are supposed to convey a genetically representative cross-section of humanity (plus giraffes and Madagascar cockroaches and cryptosporidium) through the stormy seas and into a glorious future, but only four of them make it.  That’s a lot of dead plutocrats and emirs.  There is a funny moment when the Queen of England is boarding an ark with her corgis and trying to keep her hat on, and a weird one where the pope and the college of cardinals die in an earthquake–wouldn’t they have been saved?

(Also, New York is conspicuously absent.  A shot of Times Square at a standstill as President Blackman addresses the nation is all there is.  This is fine, seeing as it’s had its turn about forty times already.  But surely a lingering embarrassment of echoing September 11 has to play a role.  If so, there is no equivalent taboo against depicting India overcome by tsunami.)

There is certainly a palpable zeitgeist that since neither crony capitalism nor Si, Se Puede saved us in 2008, the rate at which shit is falling apart has not begun to decelerate in the Obama Administration, and might be getting worse.  And by 2012 we could very well be beyond the point of no return, financially and environmentally.  It’s part of America’s supreme narcissistic nationalism that the decline of our empire must be tied to the death of the world itself, but it’s hard to argue that China or anyone will have much to inherit when our glory days are indisputably past.  (China which is now the number one greenhouse gas emitter and whose Northeast looks worse than ours).

And it’s China which basically saves humankind, damming up a valley to conceal the construction of the arks and putting up the immense human capital to do it–only, it seems, will a free-market authoritarian regime possess the will to keep us alive.