Film review – 2012

London Event Reviews by May B

I adore John Cusack – just think of all those great movies he’s been in – The Grifters, Must love dogs, High Fidelity, Serendipity, 1408, Pushing Tin and Being John Malkovich – so the earlier ropey reviews of 2012 did not deter me from spending a rainy Sunday afternoon watching it.

I have to say that it took a while for the movie to get going – if you don’t know what solar flares are then you would have been puzzled at the opening scenes. But then it was a reasonably interesting story line – with links to the various Mayan and other predictions about the end of the world in 2012. It was multicultural too – with storylines around the world in China, India, South America and London as well as USA.

It took a while to get into the main characters – including John – with a diversion into the hassles of split parenting but we got there. After a while the action started and the special effects were truly awesome – they really were breathtaking and I did find it quite exciting in parts. Edge of the seat stuff.

However, some of the elements were simply too far fetched to swallow – like escaping several times with split second timing, like the behaviour of the presidents and their advisers (including the obligatory bad guy and the "hero" black scientist), like the effort to save some of the world’s greatest works of art and the billion dollar cost of survival tickets.

But the guys should be impressed – whilst there were no actual car chases there was plenty of fast, reckless driving and loads of explosions. I really enjoyed the scenes (from a special effects point of view) of skyscrapers collapsing, whole cities tipping into oceans, volcanoes erupting and tsunamis covering the majority of the earth’s land masses. A disaster movie it is.

It gets really rather cheesy in the final scenes – which are luckily enmeshed with lots more exciting action and special effects. And naturally there is a reasonably happy ending (bearing in mind most of humanity gets wiped out) – just like the original Noah and his ark story.

The film is long. The screening started at 4pm and after 30 minutes of mostly alcoholic drinks and perfume advertisements we were fidgety. But we didn’t emerge blinking into the grey evening until almost 7pm. That’s a long time without a comfort or fag break guys.

Posted Date
Dec 7, 2009 in London Event Reviews by May B by May B