2012 Review

As many of you may already know the ancient Mayan civilazation's calender comes to an end on the date 12/21/2012. Why did the Mayans choose this date to end their calendar? Did they get tired one day and just stop and go home? Did they run out of stuff to write on? Or did they actually foresee something happening at this time? I have looked into potential catastrophes that could occur on this date myself, the most likely being a solar flare event. In this case that's exactly the primary focus of the movie.

The beginning of the movie is used to setup the whole idea of what's going on, the idea of a peaking solar storm turning our planet into one big microwave, cooking it from the inside out. Now personally I couldn't see something on that large of a scale actually occuring. But then we wouldn't have much of a movie if there wasn't a major catastrophe now would we?

For the most part the plot focuses around one man named Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who is trying to find a way to save his family from the ensuing chaos occuring all around him. That is one thing this movie has no shortage of, it's absolutely loaded with action and destruction to the highest degree. You've never seen destruction on this kind of a scale before. Many scenes in this movie are nearly completely computer generated, but nearly all of them look very realistic and believable. That being said, there are a few wacky moments in the movie as well, such as when an aircraft carrier gets taken in on a tidal wave and takes out the white house. It's cool to watch, but not very high on the believable scale.

The movie focuses around several major events occuring on the planet at the same time, however the west coast of the U.S. is where the shit hits the fan first. It starts off with a few earthquakes and things rapidly go downhill from there until eventually entire tectonic plates below the surface of the Earth begin shifting positions causing California to sink right into the ocean, that's not where I'd want to be when this all started to go down that's for sure. Makes me glad I live in the midwest.

The acting in this film was very good, it had plenty of stars in the cast including Danny Glover as the president of the United States and Woody Harrelson as a zany, pickle loving, conspiracist who did a radio broadcast about all kinds of conspiracy theories. There are a few jokes tossed around here and there, but overall the movie keeps a fairly serious tone. I also couldn't help but think some of the emotional scenes were a little overdone. I understand they wanted to get the reaction from the audience but to me it just seemed liked they should've been more focused on the action than on teary phone calls.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie though because 2012 is a subject that I have long been interested in since I first heard about the prophecy when I was around 12 years old. I do recommend seeing it for the breathtaking CGI scenes as well as an action-packed story that will keep you gripping your arm rests for the duration of the ride. Whether or not anything in this movie will actually come to pass is yet to be seen. Will 2012 actually be the end of the world? I doubt it. Will anything happen at all? Possibly. But afterall it's Hollywood's job to spice up what they have to work with and they certainly did a good job doing so with this movie.