Movie Review: 2012

Since there has been so much media attention on the date 2012, and the Mayan calendar that predicts the end of the world, I expected the movie 2012 to be better than it was. The movie poster (of one lone Himalayan monk standing on the snow covered mountain tops) gave the impression that this would be a spiritual movie...a transcendent movie.  A movie about the mystical knowledge of the Mayans and their ability to see thousands of years into the future, and be able to create a calendar that supposedly ends on December 21, 2012.

Instead, the movie 2012 focused on special effects, which were were astounding!  The film was a magnificent visual spectacle of destruction, with whole cities and continents vanishing into the ocean, and a gigantic world wide Tsunami that obliterated every coastal line. These scenes of destruction were very emotional, visually intense and many times relentless!

But 2012 lacked good dialogue between the main characters, Jackson Curtis (John Cusak), who after finding out that world will end, goes back to California to save his ex-wife, Kate Curtis (Amanda Peet), their kids and her new boyfriend. Practically everything they talked about was their relationship, and why it failed. They never asked: Why it is this happening? Will we survive? What will we eat? Where will we live? How long will this last? 

And no one showed enough emotion, except Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), who was fantastic as the fanatical Yellowstone conspiracy theorist, who warned Curtis about the end of the world. Frost and the President, Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover) were the only ones who gave the audience any information about what was happening. And these explanations were too brief, and did not tell enough about why these specific powerful solar flares were causing the earth's core to heat up. 

If the actors had shown some greater emotional depth, and had been given a better script, this could have been a profound film!