“2012”: Roland Emmerich destroying the earth yet again

In “2012” landmarks are submerged, scorched or altogether shredded.

When his latest tale of the apocalypse, “2012”, arrives in theatres this coming weekend, the filmmaker Roland Emmerich will have waged more assaults on this planet than he can remember. He's frozen it, drowned it and unleashed aliens and Godzilla on it. The earth is his Jason Voorhees from “Friday the 13th”, and it just keeps coming back.

Well, not after the pulverising the earth takes in “2012”. “This is my last, quote-unquote, action-disaster movie,” Emmerich, the 53-year-old German director behind spectacles like “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow”, says. “I know I can't destroy the world again. That would be kind of a joke.”

In this latest calamity, a monster solar flare shoots invisible neutrinos into the earth's core. The seas rise. Tectonic plates shuffle. Volcanoes erupt. And every edifice and geographic landmark in their paths (save for a few sacred sites) is submerged, scorched or altogether shredded. Somehow the concepts of plot and character development -- amid all the mayhem, John Cusack plays a failed novelist turned limo driver for a Russian oligarch -- cling to dear life.

Alien invaders, tsunamis and asteroids have crashed into Emmerich's oeuvre since he first blew up the White House in 1996 with a blue death ray, in “Independence Day.” (Even the Discovery Channel followed suit with its own doomsday-theme reality series called “The Colony.”)

In “2012” Emmerich pits the accelerating entropy of the planet against a worldwide government conspiracy -- Noah's Ark meets “The X-Files”. And he tries to top his previous disaster movies by turning up the scale of destruction in the film's 157 minutes. (This time he lets the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, sitting in Chesapeake Bay, wipe out the White House.) He also slips in even more ridiculous jokes right before tragedy strikes. Gordon (Tom McCarthy) tells his love interest, Kate (Peet), “I feel like something is pulling us apart.” Then a gaping fissure opens between them in the aisle of the supermarket where they're standing; it's the beginning of an earthquake that eventually sends California sliding into the Pacific.

Viewers might also recognise the archetypes Emmerich first defined in “Independence Day”. Cusack takes over from Jeff Goldblum as the reluctant hero. Peet replaces Vivica A. Fox as the strong mother. Randy Quaid's portrayal of a loopy crop-duster and U.F.O. abductee is subbed out for Woody Harrelson's recreational-vehicle-driving pirate-radio host and conspiracy theorist Charlie Frost. “The reason the film works is that you get sucked into the characters,” Cusack says. “Otherwise people would be comparing it to 'Transformers'.”

Source: The New York Times