Whenever I watch one of these kind of movies, I am left with one nagging thought.  No, it’s not that the science is a little way too out there.  Or that due to sheer mathematical probability the main characters should have died at least a dozen times over.  The thought that bothers me, and actually makes these movies more enjoyable, is this: “Wow, they must have been pretty damn high to think this crap up.”  It makes sense, right?  Why else could you consider a plane taking off from a crumbling runaway and narrowly escaping some sort of intense danger, three times no less, a good idea?  I can see the conversation now, “Duuuude, wouldn’t it be so awesome if like, the earths crust was like, turning over and stuff?” “Yeah man, that would be awesome, and like, it causes the world to flood!” “Yeah!  And they escape through these like, giant arks, like Noah.”  “Man, Noah was so cool.” “Yeah.”  The smoke thickens as the camera pans out from our overly baked creators.

I have to say, the visuals were pretty freaking awesome.

That is why, if I were inclined to do any sort of drug, I’d probably be sure to get a nice buzz going before watching 2012.  It actually does a decent job in the beginning, doing some very good set-up.  I especially enjoyed the talk of neutrinos mutating into a nuclear particle that was heating up the earths core.  For one, particles don’t “mutate,” chiefly because if particles change, it is induced by how they were created, thus a particle does not spontaneously “mutate” into a different form without some sort of impetus.  And if a particle is created in an isotope form, it is not considered to have mutated.  Also, the idea of neutrinos actually interacting with matter is pretty out there.  These particles are so small, so fast and with such a small mass, the only interaction they see are with the insides of the sun, where many of them are created.  Trillions of these particles pass through your body every second and they never touch you.  Sure, the earths core is ultra-dense, but this was just a weak implication of a relatively unknown field of physics just to placate the masses with a few big words.  I doubt any real research went into it.

Ok, I’ll stop with the science talk, but it had to be said.  I love John Cusack, he’s one of my favorite actors and I actually liked him in this movie.  In fact, if you take this movie, compare it with all the other disaster movies, I say it’s the best we’ve seen for a while.  I especially enjoyed the interplay between Cusacks characters book he wrote and what was happening to the world he lived in.  It was very subtle, you had to be paying attention, but this could have been a much bigger theme that would have added a level to this movie that we haven’t seen in its counterparts.  The film-makers only used it sparingly at the end, giving some significance to Johns character, but not nearly as much as they should have.

It’s no surprise this was better than some of the rest, the guys behind this movie, Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser, were also behind The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day.  It was pretty obvious they tried to learn from the mistakes they made in these other films, but equally obvious they didn’t try to avoid new ones.  As I mentioned previously, the main characters should have died far too many times.  I understand wanting to build suspense and keep the action going, but this was done in a very poor way.  There have to be other ways to keep things intense besides near misses with death, it just seems a cheap and over-used trick by fairly brain dead movie makers.

Despite all that, they managed to make this movie last two and-a-half hours.  There was at least 30 minutes of uselessness they could have cut, another 30 of unneeded disaster-almost-deaths, where they could have thrown in good movie making.  But if that’s not what they wanted to do, so be it.