2012 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Despite all the jokes about Roland Emmerich's love for blowing up cities, how the hell Lloyd Dobbler will save the world, and of course, the infamous line "Download my blog," 2012 earned $225 million worldwide in its opening weekend.

I dislike adding "porn" or "-sploitation" to descriptive phrases (torture porn, poorsploitation, etc. etc.), but if anything could be called an exploitation of our natural fear of an upcoming worldwide crisis, it would be 2012. Eerie shots of crowds praying en masse and major landmarks crumbling are juxtaposed with smaller stories, like the family struggling to stay together, a personal crisis set off by an ethical conundrum, and, of course, the prophet-kook in the woods who's happy to see his greatest suspicions verified.

Orson Welles's radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds sent Americans running for their bomb shelters in 1938, and once everyone realized it was just a radio show (and recovered from their terror), a new type of horror was born: the fear of massive worldwide destruction.

Every US generation thinks it's going to be the last. If it's not the Cold War, it's the Middle East, and if it's not aliens, it's the ice caps. But it's also a reality; it's mind-boggling to turn on the news and see footage of a tsunami that's killed about 230,000 people and injured and displaced so many more.

Occasionally you'll hear a movie branded as "criticproof," which I take to be a derisive term implying that the masses will flock even though the movie in question is garbage If there's an entire genre that may now get described as "criticproof" it's the disaster movie. No amount of bad reviews could keep people away from watching Roland Emmerich destroy the world anew in 2012, which made $65 million domestically and $225 million worldwide. The domestic numbers are comparable to The Day After Tomorrow which, among other things, ran 40 minutes shorter. The foreign numbers are even stronger. Those who've seen the movie shouldn't be surprised. Think of it what you will (it's probably my favorite Emmerich film, which is not saying a lot), but it's pretty incomparable as special effects spectacle.

2012 had the box office pretty well to itself this weekend. Its only new competition in even semi-wide release was Pirate Radio, which largely flopped despite the enthusiastic pimping of the Love Actually connection -- under $3 million on 880 screens. Faring better was Precious, which expanded to just under 200 screens and earned $6 million. With Precious and Paranormal Activity, this is proving to be a good season for slow roll-out platform releases; Precious seems to be doing a nice job of building awards buzz, too.

As expected, A Christmas Carol turned out to be durable, still running way ahead of The Polar Express, and looking to get a bump from the Thanksgiving holiday in a couple weeks. Look for this one to stick around the top 5 for a little while. On the other hand, the reign of 2012 meant big hits for the holdover genre films, including The Fourth Kind, The Box, and Paranormal Activity.

The box office chart after the jump.

The most common retort one gets when talking negatively of a film clearly intended to be consumed with a tub of popcorn and a brain switch in the off position is "Why can't you just enjoy the movie?" And I get that. I am the kind of viewer who can absolutely just sit back and let sights and sounds wash over them. But what some fail to understand is that even with the brain turned off, even with disbelief firmly suspended, some movies stink so ferociously that the stench wafts off of the screen, snapping even the most resistant critic to full alertness like a slap in the face by a glove spiked with smelling salts.

2012 is not immune to analysis simply because it is an openly absurd movie. Sure, it's about the end of the world taking place three years from now. Sure, it features some astounding special effects. Sure, it is in every way, shape, and form a popcorn tub movie. And sure, you know from the trailer alone whether or not you're game for yet another disaster porn movie from The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day director Roland Emmerich. But what the willing don't inherently know, and this is the most crucial piece of information one can be equipped with before hand, is that 2012 is 158 minutes long.

Granted, one would expect the end of the world to take more than 90 minutes, but the biggest failing of 2012 is that it barely has enough story to span half an hour, yet alone two more beyond that. Sign up for all the California-sinking, supervolcano-erupting mayhem you want, but what you're signing up for comes packaged with banal, one-dimensional characters who are only ever allowed to spew groan-inducing dialogue like so many fireballs from a, well, supervolcano. And considering the spectacle is unfortunately a fraction of the length, the audience is given more than enough time to wonder how so much mediocrity came to be from such talented people.

We both know that I could probably fill all seven slots of this list with just scenes from Roland Emmerich's disaster-tastic 2012, but in the interests of letting everyone else get a chance to see it, let's stick with films that have already come and gone. Some of these titles qualify because of the uniquely ridiculous nature of their disasters, while others count for what ridiculous plots unfold amidst otherwise ordinarily perilous acts of nature.

There will be a couple of spoilers to go along with our picks, but since most of these have been out for a couple of years, it's not like it's the end of the world...

Christmas came a little early allowing the animated 3D film A Christmas Carol to lead the box office, but not by as large a margin as many had expected. The Box was the only one of last week's wide releases to miss the top five, landing in sixth place. Here's the top five:

1. A Christmas Carol: $30 million
2. Michael Jackson's This Is It: $13 million
3. The Men Who Stare at Goats: $12.67 million
4. The Fourth Kind: $12.2 million
5. Paranormal Activity: $8.2 million

We've got two new flicks fighting for your dollars this week:

2012
What's It All About: They say the world will end with not a bang but a whimper, but director Roland Emmerich seems pretty sure it will happen with several kabooms and a motherload of digital effects. John Cusack stars as a man determined to keep his family alive during a global cataclysm predicted by the Mayan calendar.
Why It Might Do Well: Emmerich has already destroyed the world in Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, so he must be getting pretty good at it by now.
Why It Might Not Do Well: Maybe Emmerich has played his apocalypse card once too often.
Number of Theaters: 3,000
Prediction: $54 million

Pirate Radio
What's It All About: In the 1960s eight DJ's set up shop on a ship off the coast of England and broadcast rock and roll to the masses, much to the chagrin of the British government.
Why It Might Do Well: Phillip Seymour Hoffman is joined by Nick Frost and Bill Nighy, and the classic rock soundtrack sounds amazing.
Why It Might Not Do Well: It's a smaller release, so it won't be breaking the bank.
Number of Theaters: 900
Prediction: $6 million

Here's how I think next weekend will go:
1. 2012
2. A Christmas Carol
3. Michael Jackson's This Is It
4. The Men Who Stare at Goats
5. The Fourth Kind

Spoiler Warning: The world isn't going to end in 2012.

The most comical aspect of Sony's marketing strategy for 2012 is that it's got people actually believing that the world is going to end in the year 2012. Folks are so beside themselves that NASA has already intervened to try to combat the thousands of paranoid emails they've received, and now Discovery.com is doing their part to calm down the human race by attempting to prove that the world will not end on December 21, 2012, contrary to what those dastardly Mayans predicted.

What they've done is collected the 10 most popular doomsday scenarios and then systematically debunked each one by presenting, ya know, facts and stuff. So before your cousin Eddie tries to convince you that he totally know what he's talking about and the world is, like, totally going to end in 2012 because he saw it somewhere on TV at some point but he doesn't remember where, well, you might want to read up on what the Discovery folks have to say. Here are a couple examples:

4. An asteroid will smash into Earth.

A threatening near-Earth asteroid that's gotten the most press is the 900-foot wide Apophis. But its chances of collision have been downgraded to 1 in 250,000 at its next close approach in 2029. In theory, an uncharted asteroid or comet could come out of the blue tomorrow. But if we don't know about it today, the Mayans certainly didn't know about it 1,200 years ago. Earth-killer impacts are tens of millions of years apart. So there's no reason to be a doomsday clock-watcher.

More after the jump ...

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: