Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I pointedly stayed away from this movie. I didn’t want anything to do with the 2012 doomsaying because it was a load of bunk and hucksters were coming out of the walls to scare and fleece people, so I certainly didn’t want to touch the big blockbuster movie profiting off of that hype. Anything cosmological being cited was clearly nonsense or overblown, and the much-touted Mayan calendar was almost certainly a case of “plotting out thousands of years in the future is good enough for now”. But I think twelve years (15 years since release) is enough time to put some emotional distance in place.

After watching the movie:

In 2009, astrophysicist Satnam Tsurutani alerted his friend geologist Adrian Helmsley that the Earth’s core is being heated up by neutrinos from the sun, and this will have devastating consequences for all life on Earth. Helmsley immediately flew back to Washington to show these findings to the White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser, who brought it to President Thomas Wilson and drafted Helmsley into a secret, worldwide plan to preserve the human race and culture without causing panic. In the Himalayas, the combined efforts of 46 nations converged on the construction of a “hydroelectric dam”. Around the world, priceless art is spirited out of museums and replaced with replicas. In 2012, Jackson Curtis, sci-fi writer Jackson Curtis whose first novel sold only a few hundred copies, takes a weekend vacation from his job as the Los Angeles chauffeur of Russian billionaire Yuri Karpov to spend the weekend with his kids Noah and Lilly in Yellowstone, an old favorite spot of his and his ex-wife Kate’s. When Jackson takes the kids inside a government fence around Yellowstone Lake and finds the lake dried up, the military picks them up and tells them to go home, which they do after pirate radio conspiracy theorist Charlie Frost asks Jackson what he saw inside and tells him the government doesn’t want them to know that the Earth is about to rip itself apart and he knows of a secret plan to escape. When Jackson returns to work and Yuri’s children taunt him about how they have tickets to get on “a big ship” and he doesn’t, Jackson rents a small plane and gets Noah, Lilly, Kate, and Kate’s boyfriend Gordon to come with him to get back to Charlie and get his map of where they need to escape to, taking off just as California begins to fall into the sea. Jackson and company arrive at Yellowstone and find Charlie with just enough time to learn from him where to find the map before the Yellowstone Caldera erupts, emitting an ash cloud big enough to reach Washington in hours, where Mr. Anheuser is preparing the President and White House staff to get on Air Force One to their places on the arks.

I’m pretty sure the main intent was more “exciting city destruction visuals with a side of social commentary, but the sheer scale of destruction, watching multiple locations full of people get destroyed, made me feel like I was being a party to some sick voyeurism. I remember the destruction in Man of Steel being so excessive that it made superhero movies change course and put an emphasis on the cities already being mostly empty so their titans can have their grudge matches with no casualties, but this is on an entirely different level. This is a movie that spends most of its two and three quarters of an hour throwing scared masses to their deaths as the world population is winnowed from billions to thousands. Multiple scenes are dedicated to characters facing their immanent demises. I can’t just have fun with the action sequences when the movie refuses to let you forget its body count.

The technobabble explaining why what’s happening is happening was hilariously bad but you don’t really have to worry about it after the title drops. Everything is very close to something plausible but then takes a turn for the dumber. The “cosmic alignment” that supercharges the sun seems like it was obligated to be included because it’s part of what people actually believed was going to be why the world would end, so I can live with it. I would’ve accepted “neutrinos usually don’t interact with massive particles, but they have a billion times the chance now, and the increased interactions are heating up the core,” but I have only come close to turning something off for bad science one other time, and “the neutrinos have mutated into a form that acts like microwaves” almost got me. There was also a comment about the tectonic plates being free to move once the mantle expands made me roll my eyes a little because they are always moving, that’s what tectonic theory is all about.

Danny Glover and Woody Harrelson are perfect in their roles, and Yuri was played to exactly what you expect a Russian oligarch to be. However, John Cusack kind of seemed like he was sleepwalking through the movie, and I have an inking that this is kind of his normal style, which can work in some settings, and maybe for where he starts out, but it doesn’t fit pretty much anything after the catastrophe begins, and not much point is being made by this because he gets to do action movie protagonist things like he isn’t being played like a slacker deadbeat dad.

A few times I felt a glint of parallel with climate change, though not as overt as something like Don’t Look Up, because the commentary here is just seasoning on the spectacle. It would really be nice if world leadership could spring into action with a global, multitrillion dollar plan to respond to the threat of this planet turning uninhabitable, only it probably would end up being a solution mostly for the rich and powerful anyway. But then the destruction starts earlier than predicted for reasons that are never adequately explained, so the well oiled machine ends up dissolving into chaos, which is also a little too close to what it would probably be like if our leaders did anything about the existential threat we’re facing.

There are kernels of good here, but I feel like they’re here and there around the main draw of the movie, which just disturbed more than awed me. I wish I’d seen the better parts in a better movie.