Main cast: John Cusack (Jackson Curtis), Amanda Peet (Kate Curtis), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Adrian Helmsley), Thandie Newton (Laura Wilson), Oliver Platt (Carl Anheuser), Tom McCarthy (Gordon Silberman), Woody Harrelson (Charlie Frost), and Danny Glover (President Thomas Wilson)
Director: Roland Emmerich
2012 is clearly a very expensive movie to make. So much money was spent on special effects that I don’t think much money was left to hire any decently literate person to come up with a script. Roland Emmerich and one Harold Kloser ended up doing the writing duties, and together they make George Lucas come off like a prizewinning writer.
Anyway, yes, the world is ending in 2012, blah blah blah. Tsunamis, meteor showers, people running for cover, the inevitable cringe-inducing speech about human sacrifice and selflessness, and everything else you can imagine are here. The main characters are the Curtis family whose plot armor is so obvious here that there is never any suspense that they will actually be in any danger. They keep getting lucky so often, after a while the whole story seems to be a running gag that isn’t funny.
The acting is pretty bad, as everyone from John Cusack to Danny Glover is going through the motions as if everything they know about acting they learned from repeated viewings of Independence Day, and even then, they get a C- for their efforts. There is hardly any credible emotion displayed in this movie, which makes it very hard to actually relate to what is happening on the screen. Say what you will about Titanic, but that disaster movie works because the audience is drawn into caring for the plight and the fate of the characters in the movie. Sure, Titanic boasts as many cheesy and artificial lines as this movie, but that movie is heartbreaking to watch, while 2012 is just an expensive hollow movie.
To conclude, 2012 is the kind of movie to watch when you just want to watch shiny explosions and various special effects on the big screen. If you want some compelling drama or even any halfway decent story, skip this one and keep looking some more because this one isn’t going to be the movie you are looking for.
