2012 by Roland Emmerich
With a new heat wave hitting the Cape of Good Hope down here in South Africa, the best place to be today was the sea, the fridge or … the movie theatre.
So we went to see the movie “2012″ by Roland Emmerich – which USA Today called “… the mother of all disaster movies”… and truly so.
OUFFF! Disaster isn’t my cup of tea at all, but with my interest in Design and 3D Animation and being a grand movie freak, I went there for the special effects… and I got more than I wanted! In fact, I needed some time to land after having been swept across all continents by land, air and sea escaping monstruous tsunamis, tornado earth quakes, continental shifts, polar inversions etc etc and this in all sorts of ways the human race literally raced to survive after solar flares had basically set the inner earth core on fire with temperatures rising at gigantic speed and dramatically changing the planet forever.
2012 by Roland Emmerich
Without today’s fascinating and incredibly advanced technological possibilities – and corresponding budgets – a movie like 2012 by Roland Emmerich would very probably never be made.
The storyline isn’t that different basically from what you may remember from “The Day After Tomorrow” – when temperatures over especially North America dropped astronomically within just 7 short days and the President of the USA had to make some difficult and drastic evacuation decisions… Here we have the inversion on a global scale, we also have the ‘warning’ and the initial disbelief of the world’s political leadership in what some scientists from the other end of the world – this time at the bottom of a boiling hot copper mine in India – have to report… until things start happening… literally cooking… California disappears, Yellowstone disappears, Washington falls, the Vatican collapses. . . and there is almost no more place to go, no escape… but for those privileged 400,000 who could pay a ticket at 1 Billion Euros a piece – who of course consider themselves as the creme de la creme of the human race and worth of carrying on the species after three modern “Arks” (… well built in advance for this exact planetary situation, hint, hint… and conspiracy believers are nodding…) would place them together with some representative Master pieces of our Civilization’s Art and Culture – like the Mona Lisa, officially stolen from the Louvre – into a new dawn… to start again from scratch.
The joke for me was that this place – at the end of the movie – this new dawn… was exactly here, at the Cape of Good Hope… in the middle of the current heat wave – and the Drakensberg became the highest mountain on earth. Yeah, life would start again in Africa … and there were surrealistic vistas when, within the total apocalyptic chaos, we see helicopters transporting giraffes and elephants in biblic ‘two’s – so African safaris in the brave new world would be secured…
Yet, with so much overwhelming chaos at incredible lengths and with hammering music slashing out at our emotional barometers, one was no longer drawn into the magic, it was too much, too long, too loud, too obvious, and despite the incredible Special Effects – well, less would have been more in my personal view.
I had also been interested in how the Mayan Calendar had been woven into the story, knowing that there was never a prediction of an end of the world but the beginning of a new era or epoche, called the era of “Ethics” – which I would greet with all my heart… but except in stereotypes like “If we stop caring for one another, we lose our humanity” … there wasn’t much of what I would have expected.
So if you are a fan of disaster movies and this is exactly what you expect – then the movie delivers the promise, then this is for you.
You were warned!
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