***SPOILER ALERT*** Today, at the Lord’s Glorious Hour of 1:30 AM (Blame car-wreck injuries–can’t sleep so I am blogging!), I am blogging about 2012, the film I just saw with Trev. I couldn’t stop thinking about it on a number of levels and figured, if I was so opinionated and interested, why not share it with the world? Sharing shall commence!

First of all, if you are worried about a REAL impending apocalypse within the next 3 years please read HERE and HERE. I am about as big of a fan of the US Government as the next guy/gal, and I enjoy me some conspiracy theory once in a while–but I think it has to be said that NASA does a fine job of dispelling the myths. You can breathe easy. Oh, and don’t forget: I am STRONGLY considering throwing a party at my place on Jan 1st, 2013….in case of Apocalypse Jesus will fill you in on change of venue (HAHA! That one doesn’t get old–thought it up a year ago when someone on the net tried to predict the Rapture as happening this past May–but that is a whole different tale). (Of note and disclosure: I believe in God, Satan, the Diety of Jesus and the existence of Angels and Demons–just I enjoy being somewhat antagonistic to people who try to predict when the end will happen when Jesus himself had the good sense to say he had no clue!).

Ok, jokes and rumor dispelling aside, on to the film! I need to reiterate that I am going to be typing freely so do NOT get testy with me if I spoil a part of the film for ya! If you need to see it pure, please go see it then read this post

Overall, I think I was impressed. 200 Million Dollars sure as heck buys a lota purdy pixels, so the special effects feel very Michael Bay-ish (take that or leave it as you might–I don’t totally mind the man personally so it is put into the plus column for me). I guess saying, “I think I was impressed,” sounds weak…and, through the course of this post you’ll prolly see why I am so tepid on the film as a whole…..some elements were downright striking. The visuals. The cinematography. The intensely human story that takes snapshots of several lives and makes them so endearing I teared up at least 4 times. There is a lot to love and, for a death, destruction and da-speshel-effects film, there is actually a lot of uplifting material that reminds us all of the better parts of ourselves. There was so much that made me want to love this film (as opposed to merely ‘like’)! However, some pieces of the film jarred me violently out of the fantasy and kind of peppered the experience with a bad flavor. Upon reading my admittedly short laundry list of complaints you may find me to be whiny–I don’t want to be impossible to please but, for one reason or another, these little tidbits held the film away from greatness in my mind:

A) Super Plane Escape Go!
I am sure you have all seen the commercial. If not, here is your shot:

Epic footage huh? Actually, I had never saw that specific trailer before (I had only seen a severely truncated version). The one I was seeking out only showed the little white plane escaping from a crumbling California city, with an epic dive through 2 towers crumbling in a way that has seems to have a strong emotional undercurrent connection to 9/11. That was a compelling trailer. A little off (how could a taxi driver drive on the only street not crumbling, get to the only plane undamaged, take off from the only safe runway and fly under 2 towers? Deus Ex Machina anyone?) but still compelling. Not so compelling when essentially the same damn scene replays itself for a full 3 times throughout the film! What is worse, they show you the other 2 times in this trailer! The same plane makes the EXACT same daring escape from a fuel-up in Yellowstone National Park, then the crew aboard this craft switch planes in a different city and have the exact same escape AGAIN, only in a bigger plane and with more people with them. It is truly hard to determine if they have the crappiest luck in humanity (having to escape practically certain death the same way multiple times) or if they have the absolute best in all of humanity (by sheer fact that everyone is able to repeat these escapes–several different towers crumbling and all–with no one dying out of this little mini crew until way after all 3 plane scenes occur). Either way, if the film were to be split up into 3rds, the entire middle 3rd would be dedicated to repeated airplane fiascoes that seemed to be copied/pasted with minimal changes.

B) Maya Who?
I bet that trailer really set a tone for you, huh? An ancient civilization, now forever lost, has predetermined our doom by airplane fiascoes and Naval-Destroyer-toppling tsunamis! If only we had listened to them! Well, actually, that trailer does MORE to mention the Mayan culture and calendar (neither of which, BTW, predict a real-life apocalypse–but I am NOT dinging the film for this–just adding it in!) than the full 3 hour film does! A brief mention is made (actually, the news footage in the trailer of the cult that committed mass suicide at the Mayan temple–this footage lasts exactly as long in the film as it does in the trailer), however the trailer does far more to bring the Mayan people in than the film does. The film instead chooses to focus on natural phenomenon and science–which is good–but methinks that, for a film that promoted itself so heavily on the Mayan culture and alleged Mayan End of Days, maybe one of the airplane scenes could have been deleted to make room for more references. It would have added a level of mysticism and ethereal fear that, if done correctly, could have been a great foil and balance to the Science and Natural Phenomenon in the film.

C) Natural (Writing) Disasters
Here is where I really think some of you will think I am nit-picking–but here-goes anyways. The first scene to strike ire in me is the one involving Yellowstone National Park. As many people know, Yellowstone (in real life) is the remains of the crater of an ancient super-volcano, and many scientists have theorized that, if it were to blow, it’d be a life-ending event (as in, all life on earth). Technically, they play it well into the film for the exception of 2 major things. The first is a wacko (played brilliantly by Woody Harelson–sorry if I mispelled), who stands on what he believes to be the rim of the crater. You get this amazing view of the mountains starting to flatten themselves, then a MASSIVE explosion. The shockwave only knocks him over, he gets back up laughing before being taken out by a flying parcel of land. Maybe I am straining here, but I would assume most attendees understand a thing or two about history. History tells us the Mt. Saint Helen’s explosion in the 80’s was hundreds (HUNDREDS) of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I visited Nagasaki (the other Japanese city bombed in WWII, if I remember correctly with a bomb weaker than Hiroshima’s) back in 2002 and the devastation of what such a force does was made very apparent in their museum. Buildings are toppled, trees stripped bare and laid in radial patterns on the ground, flashes of light and super-displaced air so brilliant it immediately vaporizes peoples’ bodies and burns their shadows into the ground like a photograph. Remember, that is, at the very most, 1/100th of the power of Mt. Saint Helen’s, and presumably a minute fraction of this Yellowstone blast portrayed in the film. SO, I ask in all that is internet blogging, how is this man just knocked over? There shouldn’t have been a smile, there should have been a ‘dust it off before getting nailed by flying land’…there should have been immediate vaporization for any organic matter in a multi-state diameter (not to mention the family of protagonists–who were rushing away for their second magical plane getaway, with the pyroclastic flow and dust cloud moving just slow enough to enable a RV to get to the plane, then the plane to get airborne). The other thing is, as the plane is taking off (already in its’ very unrealistic version of reality), it gets hit by the dust cloud without taking any real damage to the engines or occupants. I am no avionics engineer, and I don’t have a degree in geology–so technically I could be wrong about this, but something tells me a prop-job that, at worst, is built for normal inclimate weather won’t take well to superheated gas and rock flying through the air. Just a guess. Not to mention I am not even going to go that far into the theory that, since Yellowstone’s volcano is pretty much an existence-on-Earth-ender, wouldn’t that have essentially been the end of the movie? Vaporized peeps just don’t make good protagonists, if you don’t believe me look at what they did to Obi-Wan once he dematerialized in the original Star Wars!

OK, next natural flub-up! An ocean liner is out at sea. If all the land is falling into the ocean, sounds like the perfect spot right? Not if Hollywood has its’ way (hey, atleast they were courteous enough to get the doomerz hammer first!). Tsunamis (caused by world-wide earthquakes, both on land and undersea) rise up and topple the thing like a toddler sinks his rubber ducky in the tub. One problem. Your average high school freshman knows tsunamis don’t rise in the ocean. In the middle of the ocean, if you were swimming, you could be hit by one and not even know it–it’d be the height of a normal wave. Tsunamis don’t reach their people-killing proportions until riding up onto land, the people on this ship would have been perfectly safe (barring drastic climate change due to all the chaos and/or starvation once food supplies ran out). To see this immediately pulled Trev and I out of the fantasy, which is sad because the moment is truly built up in a very emotional way. There is a lot going on and the last thing you want as a story teller is your audience being pulled out by a technicality.

In Closing
Yeah, I had some problems with the film. Yeah, my response to a 200 million blockbuster could probably be best described as tepid. However, it isn’t the run-of-the-mill tepid. Run-of-the-mill tepid consists of when a movie had elements that neither inspired hate nor love in the audience, and that is assuredly not the case here. While I hated the natural-disaster flubs, the regurgitated airplane scenes and gaps in the promotion of the film and its’ end product, I still felt there was something worthwhile there. The very emotional stories, the phenomenal cast (with highlights from Danny Glover, Oliver Platt, Woody Harelson and several other actors and actresses whom have had some parts recently, but really pick this as the film for their talents to shine) and jaw dropping effects definitely put in enough work time to make me feel as if my 7 dollar investment was, at the very least, met. It should also be said that it could have been a very easy route to just model some destruction in whatever 3D program the film crews chose and had actors run around. Instead, they added humanity to the chaos. If there is one area where 2012 succeeds resoundingly, then it must be how the very human stories told therein actually are able to outshine severe hundred million dollars worth of 3D magic. Even as I sit here, I am thinking of the people stories I saw, not so much the blowing up landscape or falling cities. That has to stand for something.

In the end, if you were to ask, I’d say it is worth the movie night to check 2012 out. Be forewarned: it probably will NOT make it into your top 10 films of all time. But, then again, I am not totally sold that every film has to be the next ‘Silence of the Lambs’ or ‘Matrix’ to forward the art of film, or even (on a more humble, yet bigger level) teach us something about ourselves and our humanity. If you have survived this blog post and don’t feel the film is spoiled for you, please go check it out! You probably deserve a night out from reading internet blogs (but, seriously, bookmark this one!) If you have survived it and felt I ruined for you–just remember you are exactly like the peeps in the film, it wasn’t like you weren’t forewarned