The end of the world would be funnier, if everyone wasn't so serious about it.
One of the special things about movies, besides the obvious entertainment value, is the window they open to certain times. Whether the stories they tell take place a thousand years in the past or several hundred million in the future the movie itself is ingrained in the very present year in which it was made. Thus, Star Wars may have been set a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away but everyone in the movie still used shitty 1970s computers. The movies of the first decade of this millennium saw an incredible renaissance in technological spectacle. When this movie’s director, Roland Emmerich, first set out to wreak large-scale destruction in Independence Day in 1995, he was still blowing up small scale set models of the White House, NYC, and LA. Now in 2012, armed with a decade and a half of new technology and several other disaster movies under his belt (Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) Emmerich has finally succeeded in what may have been his mission all along: Not just the complete destruction of all major cities or the northern hemisphere, but the entire planet.
I wonder what people in the future will think of our society in this time when they view the movies of the 2000s. In this decade we have seen ignoble trends that set this decade apart. The first started with the ultraviolent D-Day Beach scene in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Reasonably enough, that movie made it Okay to show violent gore as long as it was done responsibly and realistically. At first this type of gore stayed exclusively in war movies (Black Hawk Down, Enemy at the Gates) but sure enough it crept into other genres (Passion of the Christ, Kill Bill) until sure enough the horror genre took advantage of it. The success of the Saw franchise engendered the term ‘torture porn’ and spawned far too many copycats. Only now in 2009, did a Saw movie, Saw VI, not open with 30 million at the box office. The trend has definitely died too slow a death. The second trend is the vogue of apocalyptic movies of which 2012 is surely the king. These movies are cropping up everywhere nowadays (The Road, Knowing, I am Legend, The Happening, Terminator Franchise, War of the Worlds, Children of Men, Inconvenient Truth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Wall-E). There haven’t been this many end-of-the-world movies since the early 1960s when everyone was making movies about nuclear holocausts. There are two possibilities as to what this may mean:
1) We are indeed going through hard times as a planet, people are very worried, and Hollywood is capitalizing on that feeling, or
2) The fast and unbroken technological advancement of the past couple decades is allowing Hollywood to make essentially the same movie over and over again, just a little bit bigger each time. That trend, which first started as disaster movies in the seventies, has culminated in the apocalyptic trend of the 2000s. (One can only guess how 2012 will be topped).
In Emmerich’s case the second possibility is definitely true. I’ll let you decide if the first is also.
As I’m sure you’ve seen from the trailers, huge earthquakes and vast tidal waves destroy the world. Why? Do you really care? I didn’t. The movie attempts to give an excuse like the Mayan calendar ends and the earth aligns with the galaxy in some special way or whatever (neutrinos?). It really is beside the point. The point is that Emmerich has a new bag of digital tricks up his sleeve to unleash on his unwitting fictional humans. With that point of view an audience member can garner a good amount of enjoyment from this movie, in fact I was giggling throughout it. I viewed the entire movie as joke and all the characters in it as straight men, whose unsung job it is to play to the insanity around them as if it were comprehensible. Watching John Cusack trying to react to the oversized destruction around him was like watching someone try to engage in a conversation with Groucho Marx. It’s completely unbelievable but there is something awe-inspiring in watching the person making the attempt over and over again.
I was ready to give the movie 5 stars through the first 45 minutes of it. (My rating system is not really concerned on how great a film, but whether I think I could do it any better.) Given that the plot was about the destruction of the Earth, I could not have improved the first 45 minutes. The destruction of Los Angeles really was a spectacular spectacle. So was the volcanic explosion of Yellowstone. And I felt that John Cusack and Woody Harrelson in particular did a very good job of acting in relation to them. Then something happens that dooms most movies. The best character dies. In this case it was Woody’s crazy prophet of doom character. He met his fate while broadcasting live at the site of the Yellowstone volcanic eruption. A shame. Because with that character’s demise, so went the only person that had looked at the end of the world with any sort of joy. Frankly after Woody left, it just wasn’t as fun to witness the death of 5.9 billion humans.
I spoke of this idea somewhat in my review of Zombieland. When making an apocalyptic movie, it really hurts to take death too seriously. If you have too many sincere scenes where people say goodbye to each other before hurtling to their doom, well dude you’re gonna bum people out. And I do not go to movies that feature the complete destruction of the world to be bummed out. I come to witness some spectacle. Emmerich only half understands this for some reason. He provides the awesome spectacle and then expects us to want to be depressed about it. Like I said before, all the sincere moments would have been funnier if they weren’t so sincere.
Following the weird idea that this movie could possibly be a noble exercise in cinema, there is this really annoying scientist character named Adrian Helmsly (played by Chiwetel Ejoifer). He’s on the government side of the whole plot and spends the second half of the movie lobbying the White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) to be more humane in his effort to save the human species. In particular he doesn’t like how Anheuser basically auctioned off the seats in the Arks that the Chinese built into the Himalayas in order to finance the huge project. Anheusar has also been killing off any people that are about to give away the secret that the world is about to end. Reasonably enough, he feared that if people knew the truth then there would be mass chaos and everyone would die. This isn’t good enough for Helmsly who does some very moral grandstanding, including one speech at the end where he advocates a rather drastic change of course. He somehow gets people to agree with him and subsequently almost gets everyone killed. Point is, the guy is a complete moron and this movie’s attempt to make him into some kind of a hero is about as unrealistic and stupid as the Mayan conspiracy. I especially liked Anheausar’s bewildered response to one of his inane pleadings, “What? Life’s unfair?” He may have also added, “No shit Sherlock, the human race is being annihilated. You’re complaining about this, Now!.” Watching this guy made me more than annoyed. I would have given the movie a much better rating had Oliver Platt landed one right in his kisser during the middle of his dumb speech, especially right after he quoted a bargain basement author of an unknown book as inspiration. That would have been hilarious. That’s what Emmerich can improve on in his next movie about a black hole that eats up the entire galaxy.
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