In light of the knowledge that the world as we know it will (or might, or…won’t - tomato, tomato, right?) end in 2012, it is natural for us to try to come to terms with our imminent death by making a movie that’s fraught with conspiracy theory and giant freakin’ explosions. It’s the American way.
This movie starts off pretty badly with about a half an hour of these short scenes of seemingly random people that are spliced together in a really disorganized fashion. In the middle or so of the movie we understand why all these characters are presented to us but it still doesn’t seem worth sitting through it all. Especially because 90% of those people (spoiler alert!) end up dying anyway. Also…90% of the audience is there to see the planet destroy itself. “I don’t care about one of these idiots, get to the world-wide tsunamis!” said I and those around me. Once we got past all the tom-foolery the movie picked up a lot, understandably.
Now, the thing that I expected from this flick, which I did not completely receive, was one dramatic “oh god we’re all going to die!” moment (complete with crying children and previously estranged spouses discovering that, yes, they do indeed still love eachother) over and over again sprinkled delicately amongst scenes of the world crashing down around them. What this movie delivers instead is half armagedon movie and half low-brow PG-13 comedy movie. This is exemplified pretty well by a couple of scenes that go down toward the beginning of the destruction of the planet as we know it. Basically John Cusack and Co. have to return to Yellowstone National Park to extract some information from crazy pickle eating, radio-DJ and conspiracy theorist Woody Harrelson. Information received, Harrelson is left standing on a mountain peak (by choice) broadcasting his radio show live as Yellowstone turns into a giant erupting volcano and Cusack and his daughter drive away in Harrelson’s RV to return to the rest of the family. Things (as usual in the movie) are crumbling and being destroyed right behind the vehicle as it’s driving. They might just get sucked in, oh no! There’s giant fireballs and rolling smoke and the camper is barely escaping. Drama. Suddenly it cuts to a shot of Woody Harrelson who is facing away from the camera with his pants falling down on top of a mountain surrounded by lava. Yes, that’s right, Yellowstone has turned into a giant death trap, our protagonists family is seconds from a fiery death and they decided to edit a nice shot of Harrelson’s ass crack in there for us. You know, for comic relief as the earth turns into one giant death ocean.
This is pretty much how the movie continues to operate. Most of the tension is created by our people being very close to getting destroyed (they take off from runways right as said runways are falling away under them probably about 8 times in the movie) and through characters saying the usual action flick tropes (“My God…” or “You really need to see this…” ) while staring at something intense happening. However, the writers choose to destroy this tension by cracking frequently cheap jokes. The movie comes complete with a fat rich Russian dude with two twin Russian kids that make me want to yell “Augustus! Save some for later!” Yes, I know. Augustus and mother were german but its a similar deal. It ends up being like the world falling in on itself is like this “sticky situation” that are characters are getting into and “oh my, how are those raskals going to get out of this one?” This isn’t just me thinking that overly dramatic moments in apocalypse movies are kind of funny. These jokes were clearly done on purpose. Which is pretty fantastic. I probably would have thought this movie was pretty lame otherwise. I thought it was clever because it kept me entertained when I probably would have gotten tired of seeing one thing afer another get destroyed. They switched it up and it worked pretty well.
As far as acting goes things weren’t too bad. I was happy to see the kid from Psych. Well done, Liam James. I wish that Danny Glover had been a cooler president. I had high hopes for that. He was a little spineless seeming, and that made me sad. I was hoping for a little Tommy Lister Jr. in The Fifth Element, but didn’t get it.
The visuals of destruction were pretty awesome, which is good because thats maybe 75% of the movie. Huge buildings collapsing and giant fissures in the earth run rampant. Probably the coolest parts were where water enveloped stuff. Fantastic.
So, all in all, not an award winner by any means but if you’re looking to be entertained (and you’re entertained by insane shots of destruction and the occassional surprisingly placed joke) this is a good choice. I give it 5.75 scary shifting tectonic plates out of 10.
-Sarah Q.
Current Music - “Blue Jean” by David Bowie
