If Roland Emmerich’s stupendous new disaster movie 2012 is any indication, on December 21, 2012, the only relatively safe place to be on Earth will be in the air, preferably in a plane that has already achieved cruising altitude and so can escape the fate of most of the planes in this movie, being sucked down into bottomless chasms as the runway falls away beneath them upon takeoff, forcing them to struggle to gain altitude from below street level while buildings and elevated train cars and whatnot rain down on them. But once they gain altitude, they (and we) are able to watch from the air Emmerich’s unmatched destruction of the earth, which is exactly the same as countless other disaster movies that you’ve seen, but bigger and better. This isn’t just a disaster, after all, it’s the end of the world.

Oh, and speaking of that particular date, you may have heard some controversy about the ancient superstition that the end of the world is coming in 2012. I suggest that since you already knew about the legend, don’t waste any time contemplating the movie’s opinion about it. The real origins of the superstition are shrouded in mystery anyway, and the movie thankfully doesn’t waste a single minute theorizing on it. A character blurts something about the Mayans and then we move right on to the destruction of the earth. That’s enough about the myth for me. Trust me, the movie’s long enough!

You’ve seen the trailer for the movie, so you already know what happens. You already know that major landmarks will be gleefully destroyed (this time in super slow-motion so you can attempt to see everything and so it all looks really big). You’ll see the spectacular destruction of world famous landmarks like the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower, the Vatican City, and Randy’s Doughtnuts. You know the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier rides a tsunami wave so massive that it carries the thing right onto the roof of the White House. And you know that you meet a lot of scientists and government officials struggling to figure out the most honorable course of political action while one guy tries to rescue his family before the earth crumbles below their feet. This is all standard disaster movie fare, but here it is on such a spectacular scale and achieves a level of realism that I’m pretty sure beats anything I’ve ever seen, and that’s really all we ask for, isn’t it? We don’t need the wheel reinvented here, we just need to see some large-scale destruction at the movies every few years. And in that way, 2012 definitely delivers.

One of the few areas for innovation in a disaster movie, however, is the cause of it all. This time, it seems that a solar flare, the biggest one ever recorded, has caused a reaction within the earth, and so the core begins to heat up. As the entire planet overheats, the earth’s crust softens and the destabilized, creating localized earthquakes all over the world, especially in California, the red-headed step-child of earthquake movies. The President, played by Danny Glover, makes the wise decision to withhold the end of the world knowledge from the public for as long as possible, so as to avoid nation-wide chaos. Meanwhile, steps are being taken to evacuate an embryonic cross-section of humanity onto several gigantic ships which have been built – for exactly this occasion, as it were – by the Chinese under the Himalayas, funded by the wealthiest people in the world. These ships are the most preposterous thing in the movie (which is a powerful statement in a movie about the total destruction of the planet), but nevertheless are well-rendered and convincing. So at least there’s that.

And it’s an interesting cross-section of humanity that Emmerich has populated his movie with, too, particularly the government. Oliver Platt plays the curiously named Carl Anheuser, President Glover’s Chief of Staff who, upon receiving a red-alert message from a government scientist named Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), remarks, “It’s kind of galling when you realize that the nutbags with the cardboard signs had it right all along.” John Cusack, besides playing the movie’s resident Desperate Father, is also a failed science fiction novelist, a curious characteristic for a man who drives a limousine filled with his family under collapsing bridges and through falling skyscrapers, and later saves thousands of lives by single-handedly (well, with the help of his 12-year-old son) dislodging a jammed hydraulic door (while underwater) on one of the massive ships which, of course, is piloted by a guy named Noah. Also of note are Woody Harrelson as a lunatic indie radio host, broadcasting his pirate station from the “lip of the world’s biggest volcano,” Amanda Peet as Cusack’s wife, and Thandie Newton’s in there somewhere, too.

Underneath all this madness, however, remains the imminent approach of that ominous date, December 21, 2012. To some it represents the end of the world, to the more realistic it represents the next Y2K, but to me it’s just a date that looks kind of cool with all those 1’s and 2’s.

I doubt we'll see anything like this in December 2012, but we can always hope, right?

Still, I’m really curious to know what people are going to be doing in late November/early December of 2012. Are people going to panic like they did for Y2K, when the masses had somehow convinced themselves that a computer glitch would leave them without food or water? I doubt it. I hope not, anyway. More interesting will be what the next doomsday prediction will be when, on December 22^nd, 2012, the sun comes up and those of us not lucky enough to be on Christmas vacation will find that we still have to go to work on Monday. Personally, I’m still more interested to see the difference between the real October 21^st, 2015 and what we saw in Back to the Future II, but at any rate, if any of us survive to see it, Christmas Day in 2012 will be a day of joy, giving, love, and relief.

The Bean Meter