Cusack, Peet try to triumph over story line havoc of ‘2012’
Scott A. May, Columbia Daily Tribune
It’s “2012” and the end of the world as we know it, awash with flames, floods, bad acting and cheesy dialogue. \n ?? out of 5 stars \n Cast: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt \n D…
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Columbia Daily Tribune
It’s “2012” and the end of the world as we know it, awash with flames, floods, bad acting and cheesy dialogue.

?? out of 5 stars

Cast: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt

Director: Roland Emmerich

Rating: PG-13 for intense disaster sequences and some language

Theaters: Stadium 14, Forum 8

The world isn’t going to end in 2012. People who know Mayan culture and the infamous Maya Long Count calendar that started all this “end days” talk chuckle at the hubbub. And they see the new disaster movie “2012” as a “teachable moment.”

“The vast majority of what’s been attached to that date in 2012 online, in movies and books and on TV has no basis in the Maya world,” says Professor Robert Sitler, a Maya culture expert from Stetson University in Deland, Fla. We’re misreading that Long Count calendar, adds Eleanor Harrison-Buck, a Maya scholar who teaches at the University of New Hampshire. “The Mesoamerican concept of the ‘end of time’ is in some ways similar to our own New Year’s celebration. It represents the start of a new beginning. ... Time and space are cyclical — never ending.”

— The Orlando Sentinel

The movie’s premise is based on the mythological end of days, said to coincide with the final day of the Maya Long Count calendar — Dec. 21, 2012. Doomsday theorists predict a rare planetary alignment, resulting in massive solar flares, triggering a geomagnetic reversal that will destroy the Earth. Some call it the Rapture, others call it baloney.

Hollywood, of course, banks on disaster, and the bigger, the better. No surprise they assigned this project to the modern-day Irwin Allen, director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “Godzilla”), teamed again with frequent collaborator Harald Kloser (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “10,000 B.C.”). Given the film’s apocalyptic story line and 158-minute running length, one would hope for a screenplay of epic proportions. What we get is a silly plot, cardboard characters and at least an hour’s worth of padding.

The movie begins in present day, as American geophysicist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is informed by an Indian colleague that extraordinary solar activity has resulted in mutant neutrinos bombarding Earth, liquefying it from the inside out. Like a can of tomato soup overheated in a microwave, something’s bound to blow, causing a cataclysmic shift in the Earth’s crust sometime in the year 2012.

Fast-forward to this not-so-distant future, where we meet divorced novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), who has arranged with his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), to take his kids for an overnighter to Yellowstone National Park — a mere 1600-mile road trip from Los Angeles — where he runs into a crazed radio host named Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), who claims the world is about to end.

Jackson races home in time for all hell to break loose. Packing everyone into his limo, including Kate’s new beau, Gordon (Tom McCarthy), Jackson races for the airport, where they board a private plane and barely escape as the entire city falls into a fiery chasm. Jackson’s plan is to reach Charlie back in Yellowstone and obtain a map that will lead them to a place where the government has been secretly building escape ships.

There’s a handful of meaningless peripheral characters, including the president of the United States (Danny Glover), his daughter (Thandie Newton), a corrupt Russian billionaire (Zlatko Buric) and the president’s heartless chief adviser (Oliver Platt).

Big movies such as this cry for a large all-star cast, not a loose collection of has-beens and wannabes. As much as I used to admire Cusack, he’s not an action hero. The only performance of note is Harrelson, who steals the entire show with his short-lived stroll on the lunatic fringe. They should have cast him as the lead character, not just another casualty.

In terms of depicting wide-scale, wholesale destruction, the CGI special effects are absolutely fantastic. This is the kind of movie that begs for slow-motion replays on home video because there’s so much happening on the screen at once, it’s nearly impossible to catch all the chaotic details in real time.

The script’s problem is that it all happens much too quickly. They should have drawn out the dread — that sick, sinking feeling that something big, deep down, is not right. Instead, there’s no suspense and no foreboding, and the drama suffers greatly.

It also doesn’t help that logic and scientific reality take a flying leap in the name of narrow escapes and feel-good climactic moments. The film completely loses it in the final act, ending with a sappy, goofy denouement on par with George Pal’s 1951 “When Worlds Collide.”

Too long and drawn out for effective escapism, “2012” begins with a bang and ends with a resounding thud.