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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

With the end of the Mayan calendar coming, 2012 is the talk of the town these days and movie director Rowland Emmerich (Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow) is cashing in on the hype with 2012.

TeenHollywood sat down with Rowland and the cast of 2012 for a little Q & A.

TeenHollywood: Everyone, what are your personal beliefs about 2012 and if you believe it might be the end of the world, what would you want to be doing?

Roland: I may go skiing.

John: I will try to get on Roland’s trip, be on a mountain maybe. That book, ‘The Return of Quezalcoatl’, I think is probably more in line with what I think [about the Mayan prophecy for 2012], which is that there will be a shift in consciousness.  That seemed more like what I thought was going to happen rather than the actual
End of Days.

Chiwetel: I don’t ski unfortunately.  An avalanche is something to worry about.  I will spend it kind of quietly I think, with family and friends, and hope for the best. I don’t have a real opinion about 2012.  Like John says, hopefully a shift in consciousness or something like that. It does feel like things are converging and something has to change.  Maybe it will start around that time.

Amanda:  Yeah, I’m kind of a hypochondriac and I worry a lot about a lot of things.  I’m going to try not to worry about it too much.  That’s sort of my philosophy and that was my philosophy for the new millennium as well.

TeenHollywood: Is this the most physical film you have ever done and what was it like working on set? What was there to look at?

John: Yeah, this was a pretty action-packed show, but it wasn’t really any different from a lot of other films in a way because it was amazing production design.  Usually you have the entire set built and then in back of the set will be a green screen.  But there is a massive production design when you walk onto a set.  At the end when we’re in the mountains, would be a huge glacier field with flooring underneath and then blue screens in the background.  So we always were acting with regular sets, it’s just that the backgrounds would be digitally enhanced.  And Roland’s got a whole army working so effortlessly you could come in and just kind of do your acting job.  But yeah, there was a lot of running, jumping, tumbling. You’ve got to stay stretched out or you’ll definitely pull a hamstring for sure.

Chiwetel: Yeah, I got off pretty lightly being part of the government.

John: (points at him) The brains.

Chiwetel: Yeah, the brains.  I had a couple of days of fun water work but that was more or less it.  I was slightly envious not to get to work on the shaky floor, it looked pretty cool.

Amanda:  Roland is really thoughtful about this kind of stuff.  I remember, I have a two year old and we were shooting long days in a tank, we were in the water, and I guess I had kind of had it a little bit.  Sometimes I start to get deluded that I know something that the first AD or the producers just haven’t thought through.  I went up to Roland and said ‘Why are we moving through tanks?  We need to go back to the other set and go back to the tanks again.’  Roland was like ‘Well, do you want to be in a tank for two days in a row?’  I was like ‘No.’  I realized that was why, so he’s incredibly humane.

TeenHollywood: Roland, you got to destroy a lot of major landmarks in the movie. What were you especially excited to destroy in the film?

Roland: (laughs) Well, it’s not like I walk around ‘oooo, I could destroy this’ or ‘I could destroy that’.  It always comes out of the story. Jackson Curtis (John’s character) lives in L.A. and I live in L.A. and everybody in L.A. talks about ‘the big one’ where California sinks into the ocean so we just decided to do that. That was a great starting point.  And Yellowstone National Park got put into the story too. Sometimes it’s born out of something interesting. Like we’re destroying the Sistine Chapel.. ‘we’re already there so why don’t we have the church fall on people’s heads’?

John: (laughs) I think he’d like to destroy every Western icon in the film. And be careful if you are standing outside of a church.  It may fall on your head.

Roland: Yeah. The message is ‘never pray in front of a big church’! (laughter). And the White House, people said, ‘you can’t do this and not destroy the White House’. I thought, ‘just do it in a different way’.  At the time I was reading a lot about the Kennedys and when I was a kid I visited old warships in the Chesapeake Bay and they had just launched the JFK carrier there. Then there was a big wave in the film so I said ‘okay JFK comes back to the White House!’

For the full interview go to TeenHollywood.com.

The Institute of Human Continuity (IHC) believes that there will be a humongous catastrophe that will devastate out planet in the year 2012. Researchers believe that there are three scenarios that will occur that will destroy Earth: solar activity, crustal displacement, and planet X.

To inform and prepare us for this Armageddon which is said to occur in 3 years, Roland Emmerich, director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, has shot a film featuring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, and Thandie Newton, to show us the tragedy that Earth and all its inhabitants will endure in 2012.

The movie is set to be released in November. The movie looks really good but I’m not so sure I’m ready to see how we are all going to die in 3 years. I’m so not ready to die and especially not like how the movie predicts.