Hey all, hope you're all well.

(WARNING: This journal contains spoilers of the film 2012 - to be fair, you might want to read it anyway, and maybe save some money...)

I went and saw 2012 with a few mates yesterday; it is an absolutely visually stunning film, with some of the best and most catastrophic scenes of devestation I've ever seen in a film. That, however, is where the praise ends. From the bloated cast of mostly 2D charecters (including a family that was a blatent rip off of Tom Cruise's family in War of the Worlds) to the repetitive and time-consuming escape sequences, to the horribly cliched beginning, middle, and end, this film is one of the biggest loads of bull I've seen for a very long time. All I can say is thank god I didn't have to pay for the privilege, due to the fortune of having a good friend that works for the cinema company.

Throughout the film, I was never quite sure who to be rooting for, with most of the main charecters being portrayed alternately by scene as absolute dicks or angelic saints.
As I mentioned, the destruction and escape scenes, while impressive, got rather tedious rather quickly - after I'd seen the first airport runway collapse into the bowels of the Earth, with the protaganists just barely escaping via plane, I was relatively satisfied - after I'd seen it TWO MORE TIMES, it was getting annoying. Also, the lack of justification for much of the destruction began to annoy me too - OK, so I can understand the collapse of the Pacific west coast into the sea, including most of LA falling into the core of the Earth, but why did it happen at Yellowstone? or Las Vegas? Surely these places would've been more likely to have been destroyed by volcanic activity or earthquakes respectively, as opposed to simply collapsing into nothingness? The explosion of the Yellowstone supervolcano was impressive I admit, but why did the ground rise up into a fully fledged mountain in a matter of minutes before exploding? A particularly humorous moment also occoured when, as the entire west coast was slipping into the sea and Yellowstone was getting ready to blow, the President's closest advisors were found watching a news report about earthquakes wracking South America. I can only assume they were watching this in order to see the destruction of the Christ the Redeemer statue, as it toppled down the mountainside before the helicopter recording was inexplicably cut off.
Another thing about the escape of the protaganists in planes - on numerous occasions the planes found it nescessary to fly through volcanic ash clouds. Now, I don't know the exact mechanics involved in volcanic ash, but I DO know that an ash fall of 1mm is enough to shut down an airport in the United States. That, coupled with numerous stories of engine failure after flight through volcanic ash, leads me to believe that the protaganists flights would most likely have been somewhat shorter than shown...
Something that I didn't even realise till I'd left the cinema - the whole premise of the film starts out with the idea that the Mayans knew about the forthcoming end of the world, and had thus adjusted their calendar so that it's ending coincided with it (a seperate conspiracy theorists issue that I shall not discuss here - unless anyone brings it up in comments). Apparently all the major religions dating back thousands of years have a similar prophecy (although lacking in exact dates, unlike the Mayans), thus explaining the various apocalypse myths pervading out there - but that's where it ends! It's never explained HOW any of the ancient civilisations knew this was going to happen, which considering that the protaganists learned about it through the use of neutrino detection, galactic cartography, and microwave analysis, leaves me to wonder if the Mayans were perhaps a lot more advanced than we'd thought.

Ultimately I know what made this such a terrible film - all this was was an attempt by Roland Emmerich to out do himself destructively after The Day After Tomorrow, and to prove that he's capable of telling the story of the "human perspective" of disasters. He chose the biggest and most relevant disaster "theory" that faces humankind right now (in three years time), in an attempt to generate a sense of urgency, as well as the most vague, to allow him to indulge in his most destructive fantasies (which turn out as half-baked and scientifically lacking, to say the least) and then even had the cheek to throw in the odd self-rightous comment as to our raping and pillaging of Earth's natural resources, as well as calling on an offhand and ill-informed commentary made by ALBERT EINSTEIN to support the film's premise, and provided us with a terribly sickening and non-conclusive ending (which I wont post here but will send you a Note about if you ask for one).

So basically, save your money, or go and see something good

-LB-


P.S. On second thoughts, maybe I should encourage people to see this film... maybe it will inform people about how absolutely STUPID the premise of the world ending in 2012 actually is...