At the local megaplex Saturday night, my wife and I were 25 minutes early walking into a theater to see 2012, but the place was already jammed, with scarcely a seat in sight. That’s not your average sold-out show – that’s anticipation. There’s nothing quite like the end of the world to get an audience united and juiced, all worked up. We were able to snag two seats in the fourth row, ordinarily too close for my taste, but in this case the super-close-up vantage worked smashingly well. Gawking up at the screen to watch all that corporate steel and glass buckle and collapse, and the earth itself crack open and erupt into an angry spew of lava, only to get doused in Biblical sci-fi tsunami waves, made for a Complete Eye-Popping Schlock Experience. It almost brought me back to the days of Sensurround, the stunt employed by Universal Studios 35 years ago to sell Earthquake (pictured above). In case you’re not old enough to remember, Sensurround consisted of giant speakers rumbling in ominous woofer frequencies so loud that the whole theater was supposed to shake. Just like in a real earthquake. There are times when, by God, I really do miss the ’70s.
I think I understand why that 2012 crowd was so beyond-punctual, so primed and pumped. Disaster movies, even more than horror films, speak — if not shout, happily — to the child within us. There’s a charmed, wide-eyed, and almost comically irreverent innocence to the way that they can turn an entire audience of sober, responsible, thinking adults into overgrown kids, sitting down to watch civilization get destroyed in much the same way that a 6-year-old lines up his toys to eagerly smash them. On some primal level, this kind of destruction simply has to be staged, so that we can all get a gander of what it might look like.
What really gives a disaster movie its flavor, though, is how well it connects with its time. The genre will always be associated, of course, with the ’70s, when Airport (1970) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), with their tarnished-glamour B-movie ensemble casts, gave way, in 1974, to the even more openly trashy double whammy of Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. When you think about it, all of these apocalyptic Debbie Downer movies were made for the long post-’60s hangover — for the disillusioned age of Vietnam and Watergate, stagflation and oil crisis, the era of Stuff Not Working and Things Coming Apart. It might be a faulty jet plane or ocean liner; it could be a skyscraper that’s a badly protected firetrap. (One of the campiest speeches in Hollywood history has to be the big “message movie” warning at the end of The Towering Inferno about how these humongous buildings need to be constructed more safely. As if that redeems the 2 hours and 45 minutes of cheesy death porn we’ve just been watching.) The disaster genre probably found its purest — if junkiest — expression in Earthquake, in which the spectacle of Los Angeles, the city of the future, crumbling into rubble was really a vision of the American future itself laid to waste.
And where does 2012 fit into all this? Forget the Mayan calendar or the End of Days. These days, we hardly need ancient religious prophecy to feel as if the world is doomed. We’re already living in a society in which the bottom (or so we fear) is falling out; the movie, with its cracking and heaving earth, just makes that literal. What’s most timely about 2012 is that its fantasy of total annihilation becomes, by the end of the movie, not just a fear but a wish, a dream of starting over. (And in one very particular symbolic continent, no less.) That’s what makes it a disaster film for the Obama era. 2012, like every zeitgeist special-effects apocalypse before it, presents the destruction of our stability as a dread-ridden, calamitous, and visually exciting thing, yet in this movie it is also a necessary thing: a way, in pitiless economic times, to clear the world, in one fell swoop, of the mess it’s become. So that it can become something better.
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For once a list of movies, none of which I’ve seen, probably a good thing I hate movies that are just buildings falling down with no plotline whatsoever, which is why I will NOT being seeing 2012
Disaster movies are fun entertainment. They are not Oscar worthy but also not just “buildings falling down”. Watch them before YOU judge!!!!!
yes, the first half of the movie was of the actors doing pretty much nothing, then the disaster scenes all came at once, the movie was rather ridiculous and it really wasn’t worth the wait.
I think that our reality is depressing enough as it is whithout having to pay to see a movie which only suggests it could get worse.
I liked it!
I find it hard to believe that a nationally known film critic is seeing movies with the common folk! But anyways, while I agree with your primary thesis, I don’t agree that 2012 fits the Obama era. Obama, whether you like him or not, ran on a hope and change platform that permeates his first term, and we’re slowly crawling out of recession. 2012 is just hacky schlock that attracts the lowest common denominator to theaters.
why is EW being nice to this movie?
it already came out five years ago, and ten years ago, etc.
That’s what 2012 was missing!!! Robert Wagner trying to save the day…..only to burn in a comically horrible death.
yes, 2012 didn’t have ENOUGH death porn!
It’s not just EW, it seems like a lotta major publications have been giving this movie a free pass. I don’t get why. It was entertaining for the first hour. After a while, the destruction just gets dull and it pretty much turns into every disaster movie ever made.
And is it just me or was this movie a little…sadistic?
I saw 2012 after EW gave it a better review than I expected, and I am very glad that I did.
Sure, you have to shut your brain off more than just a bit, but I found myself actually laughing on the inside when there was a shot of a plane flying under two crumbling towers… and surviving.
Sure, this movie is pretty classless about the way it portrays these events, but rather than the horrible reminder about how bad the world is that I was expecting, I actually think the movie helped me to de-stress. At least things could never get THAT bad.
I hope.
If you go into 2012 desperate to hate it, then you probably will. If you go in hoping to see some cool effects and escape from our bad world into a world with even more problems… but LOTS of cool explosions, then you will come away happy.
I think it is sad to see so many EW readers judging people who watch this movie without actually seeing it themselves.
Unfortunately, this article doesn’t touch on what I feel is the biggest “guilty pleasure” of disaster films, especially the 1970s disaster movies; the glee at watching big name actors die spectacular deaths. Whether it’s Shelly Winters suffering a fatal heart attack after swimming to save Gene Hackman in POSEIDON ADVENTURE or the dastardly Richard Chamberlain plunging to his fiery demise in THE TOWERING INFERNO, there’s something grand about watching a big name actor or actress eat it on screen. Especially since characters in disaster films are usually one-note ciphers, so you really don’t give a damn whether they live or die. They’re all just cannon fodder.
I forgot to mention that a big plus with this film is that you can tell the actors knew they had to go big to make it work, and this leads to some great performances from Woody Harleson, Cusak, and most of the rest of the actors in this film. It really seemed like they had fun making this film, and it made the film more fun to watch.
While bad things happen a ton in this film, I found the bombast of the proceedings to be hilarious and a blast to watch.
If that makes me part of the lowest common denominator- so be it.
that movie was good
I was there for opening weekend, and the movie was such a wild ride. Just a few hours ago, I saw the “extended” 6-minute preview of the L.A. destruction sequence on Comcast On Demand and noticed something very odd. All the people they showed dying in the movie (including the 2 old ladies in the slow car) were mysteriously edited out, minimized, and/or erased. I guess it’s more fun when we aren’t seeing “real” people dying, and just seeing the buildings torn apart.
Fantastic! Should be Best Picture, Best Special Effects, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Musical Score, BUT, the world will NOT be destroyed by water. 3 megaships will not be sailing to Africa. Volanoes will erupt. Earthquakes will rumble at 9+. Tsunamis will rip apart coasts. Mountains will crumble. etc.
Also, I believe that predicted catastrophes will MOT occur on one day = Dec. 21, 2012 – but will occur over a period from NOW ’til 2100.