2012 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

At a press junket earlier this summer for 2012, Roland Emmerich told reporters he's not doing any more blow-'em-up flicks. "I would not know how to top this... It's just one of these things, you know. I had a hard time deciding to do another disaster movie, but... you cannot make a disaster movie if there's not something --- an idea in this disaster which elevates it to something more than a disaster. And so it was this idea, you know, that there will be a global flood and it's a retelling of Noah's Arc."

Later he added, "It's not my last film, it's my last disaster film. And that's because I wouldn't know what else to do. It's just, you know what, I really didn't want to do this movie at first... But when I decided that the idea was too good to not do it for the reason I had done before, I said, okay, if I do it, I will do it in such a spectacular manner that nobody can top it for a long time. I have that pride in my work."

Watching the trailer for 2012 I couldn't help but get the feeling that Roland Emmerich was trying to tell me something. There was a lot of camera shaking and screaming and really big objects rolling over, but I think it was seeing the entire state of California lift into the air like the climax of Titanic before sinking into the depths of the Pacific ocean: Roland Emmerich hates civilization. Sure, 2012 is bound to be full of roaring musical cues that signal the triumphant survival of a tiny, tiny percentage of people on Earth, but I think it's pretty clear that his movie is going to literally rip our world apart at the seams.

But apparently that's not all that big of a deal, because Emmerich has revealed to Entertainment Weekly that a sequel to 2012 is already being plotted. Yes, a sequel to the end of the world; kind of redefines the whole 'end' part of his film's synopsis. Tentatively titled 2013, he tells EW that the follow up to his story won't be a film, but rather a television show:

"It is about the resettling of Earth. That is very, very fascinating. (2012 writer/producer) Harald Kloser and I came up with the idea and we have the luxury of having a producer on the film who is a big TV producer, Mark Gordon. We said to Mark, 'Why don't you do a TV show that picks up where the movie leaves off and call it 2013?' I think it will focus on a group of people who survived but not on the boats ... maybe they were on a piece of land that was spared or one that became an island in the process of the crust moving. There are so many possibilities of what they could do and I'd be excited to watch it."

We've already explored the history of 2012 here on Cinematical and what you need to know to see the movie (hint: the world might blow up!), but here's what 2012 stars John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, and Woody Harrelson and director Roland Emmerich have to say about the end of the world. Do they believe the world will end with a whimper or a bang, T. S. Eliot-style? Will we go out in fire or in ice? Do they even believe the world will end in 2012? Let's find out.

Roland Emmerich: It's always great if you find some sort of belief people have and put it in your movies, as fantastic as they may be. For example, Independence Day, I used Area 51 and centered my whole story around Area 51 because I found out in my research that people really believed in it. And in this movie, as we discovered the phenomenon of 2012, because some culture, the Mayas, gave the end of the world a date. An exact date. The 21st of December, 2012. And that's just so incredible and so interesting that a lot of people are fascinated by it and there's believers; there's people like you [who] just find it fascinating. I hope it will not happen. But when you research it a little bit deeper, you kind of find a lot of other cultures [that] believe the same thing. They only don't put an exact date to it, but they have other predictions which all point to 2012. It's quite eerie...

Given the topic at hand, I'd like to make it clear up front that neither I nor Cinematical are taking sides in this story about Roland Emmerich's forthcoming All Landmarks Must Die opus, 2012; I just find it a curious insight into the mind of the man who knows how to make a building fall over but good.

The trailer for 2012 plays like a highlight reel of civilization falling apart all over the world, but it's religion that gets the brunt of Emmerich's digital pounding: A Buddhist temple gets hit by a tidal wave. The Sistine Chapel crumbles to pieces as a split tears right down the middle of Michelangeo's painting of God touching Adam's finger. St. Peter's Basilica rolls over onto a crowd of devoted worshipers. Rio de Janeiro's iconic Christ the Reedemer statue falls to earth as its wracked by shockwaves. The White House is even crushed by, of all things, an aircraft carrier. But eagle eyed fans of watching organized religion get its disaster porn comeuppance will have noticed that there are no Islamic landmarks on the CGI chopping block.

That wasn't always the plan, however. Emmerich explained to SCI FI Wire that he had originally hoped the Kaaba, one of the holiest sites in the Islamic religion, would join the visual wrath of 2012, but that his co-screenwriter Harald Kloser talked him out of it:

Take THAT Roland Emmerich! The problem with these end-of-the-world movies, like 2012, is that when they come out people sometimes freak because they actually believe the world is coming to an end. The marketing strategy for the upcoming Roland Emmerich film doesn't help either, since it seems the studio wants people to believe the 2012 Mayan prophecy -- so much so that they've gone and created a whole slew of fake websites and Facebook pages tied to the film and tied to the Mayan legend. Of course, this sort of fluff may help the film's box office take when it hits theaters, but it certainly doesn't help the folks at NASA who've been fielding thousands of emails from people who, thanks to the movie and its marketing plan, think the world is ending in 2012.

Says NASA scientist David Morrison, "I don't have anything against the movie. It's the way it's been marketed and the way it exploits people's fears." To dispute some of these claims, Morrison has taken to a new online column where he's been answering questions about 2012 and the mysterious planet Nibiru.

So what does he really think about the Mayan calendar ending on that specific date in 2012? In his column, Morrison says: "Calendars exist for keeping track of the passage of time, not for predicting the future. The Mayan astronomers were clever, and they developed a very complex calendar. Ancient calendars are interesting to historians, but they cannot match the ability we have today to keep track of time, or the precision of the calendars currently in use ...

Read the rest over at SciFi Squad

Perhaps you've seen the ominous ads for Roland Emmerich's latest disaster film, 2012. Here you can see just one example of Sony's viral campaign, which I spotted outside of my apartment building a few months ago. The Mayans warned us? Why is the URL at the bottom ThisIsTheEnd.com? Enter that into your browser, and you'll find a site "run" by one of the characters in the movie who believe the world will end in 2012, which is just what seems to be happening in Emmerich's upcoming blow-'em'-up. (Incidentally, the website looks pretty much like lots of the real 2012 websites and books out there.)

But what is 2012? Why do people – lots of people, in fact – think the world is going to end on December 21, 2012? It's a fairly popular conspiracy theory, as these things go, right up there with Nostradamus. (And definitely more popular than the guy who believes the world is run by lizard people.) Back it up and let's take an all-too-brief look at the Mayan civilization and religion and why the date 12/21/2012 has got some people nervous.

Who Were the Mayans?

The Mayans were a technologically advanced Mesoamerican culture that lived in the Yucatan Peninsula and parts of Central America. The Mayans truly flourished in the Classic period, which was around 600 years between AD 300 to AD 900. During that time, the Mayans developed a more complex social order, as well as city-states with prosperous trade. There were also plenty of impressive palaces, pyramids, and ceremonial structures, but perhaps the most significant aspect of the Mayan civilization is their discoveries about science and astronomy, which led them to develop a sophisticated series of calendars. One of those calendars just so happens to end on December 21, 2012.

Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Terry Gilliam directs this tale about a wager with the devil. Like many I'm curious to see how the film holds together with the last minute change of having Heath Ledger's character played by Ledger and three other actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) but I think Gilliam has what it takes to pull this off. This one starts its limited release on Christmas day.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Werner Herzog directs this sort of remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 masterpiece of excess Bad Lieutentant. This time it's Nicolas Cage who tarnishes the badge in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I haven't been thrilled with Cage's choices of projects lately, but this one has my attention. The film goes into limited release on November 20.

2012
This newest trailer has dampened my enthusiasm for this movie. Sure the disaster effects look great, but the car and plane dodging unscathed between collapsing freeways and crumbling buildings breaches credibility. If you're still interested you can witness the end of everything on November 13.

I'd like to buy a drink for whoever coined the term disaster porn, which describes the essence of the last half of 2012 director Roland Emmerich's career, and I'd like to buy two drinks for the folks at White Colours Studios, who took the recent five-minute clip from Sony's 2012 "roadblock" promo stunt and edited it down to a lean one minute and twenty-six seconds showcasing precisely what everyone wants to see from a disaster porn movie about the destruction of Earth and everyone on it: the acting. That's right, gone are all those pesky explosions, falling buildings, crashing cars, diving planes, and sinking Californias. All that's left in the clip below are the reaction shots of the film's corporeal stars, in this particular case Amanda Peet and John Cusack.

Not only is the clip the most amusing bit of fan-editing I've seen since Shia LaBeouf's "No-no-no-no" montage, it's actually an interesting little experiment that distills precisely how much substance there is to big-budget disaster films (and by substance I mean yelling). If Sony's 5-minute promo is indicative of the rest of the movie, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, 2012 consists of about 20% acting, 80% disaster porn, which is honestly a higher proportion of things going boom and then falling into the ocean than I expected.

Ever flip through the channels during a commercial break only to find the same commercial on another network? It may seem like a coincidence, but it's actually called roadblock advertising. And I hope you're looking forward to Roland Emmerich's upcoming disaster-porn 2012, because Sony is throwing millions of dollars at all of the major networks in an attempt to be damn sure you see 2 minutes of the film on October 1st.

According to Variety, Sony's diabolical stunt plan is to have "the footage in front of 90% of all households watching ad-supported TV, or nearly 110 million viewers. When combined with online and mobile streams, that could increase to more than 140 million".

If that's not enough of an overdose on the Mayan-predicted-apocalypse loving film before it even opens this November 13th, Variety further explains that Comcast is actually going to be running a hype campaign announcing the roadblock campaign: "Comcast will launch a multi-million dollar promotional campaign on its cable networks and online to hype the roadblock, which will air on ABC, NBC and CBS, 89 cable networks, local stations in the top 70 markets, and Spanish-language networks throughout the U.S. between 10:50 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. on the West and East coasts, with the hours varying across the rest of the country."

Saturday was another busy day at Comic Con, and two of the movies a lot of folks were chatting up on Twitter and around the convention floor were Zombieland and 2012. Zombieland, of course, is that awesome-looking zombie comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin and Woody Harrelson. We already shared a report from the set with you (read that over at Horror Squad), but only at Con did Cinematical's Kevin Kelly have a chance to chat up the film's director, Ruben Fleischer, along with its star Jesse Eisenberg. Zombieland hits theaters on October 9. Watch both of those videos after the jump.

Meanwhile, Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) is back to destroy the world with epic amounts of special effects in his new movie 2012. Starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, and Thandie Newton, word is this flick will be the mother of all disaster movies -- and while Emmerich has made a name for himself destroying cities using a number of creative ways, this movie looks to take that up a notch and then some. 2012 hits theaters on November 13. Check out what Emmerich had to say to Kevin Kelly about 2012 (he calls this his "flood movie") and the end of the world after the jump.