"2012" is just what you'd expect it to be.

Caught the new pic from Roland Emmerich at a matinee on Friday.  Yes, it's as ridiculous as you'd guess, but if you're going to see this movie you'll get what you wanted from it.  It's bloated at two-and-a-half-plus hours, and its woeful attempts to address "serious" issues fail miserably (Really?  You're going to put in a big speech at the end about how everyone - rich or poor, powerful politician or average citizen - is worth saving, AFTER spending two hours telling us only to care about a few select characters, and treating the thousands of deaths around them as a background effect to impress us?).  On the other hand, I found myself surprisingly unconcerned about this blatant philosophical disconnect, since the movie is as much a cartoon as anything else.  When you have a limo cornering like a Ferrari, and the heroes always literally seconds ahead of impending doom (as my mind wandered, I found myself wondering if there would have even been a movie had Cusack woken two minutes earlier at the start of the movie, since then he would have had a comfortable two minute lead on the various phenomena he was outracing the rest of themovie).


Yet the effects are impressive, and if you go in looking for nothing more than seeing the world blow up, it's pretty cool.  I like the choice of John Cusack - a talented actor but not an A-list star - as the hero; he plays the role perfectly well, and the filmmakers recognize that we're going to this movie to see the effects, not the actors.  The scipt... well, not so much, it's treated as a necessary evil.  And boy IS it evil - while I'm not quite sure it's "necessary." I suggest next time that Emmerich forgo a plot entirely:  he's good at destroying stuff, not so good at emotion or character.  Instead of giving us 150 minutes where half of it is painful to even try to watch, how about a solid 80 minutes of great effects and then let us out of the theater before our butts hurt from sitting too long?



Oh, and one last note:  I'm pretty sure that however big solar flares got, this would not be enough to change the fundamental nature of elementary particles like neutrinos.  I'll add this to The Saint and Chain Reaction on the "most ludicrous attempts to justify crazy plots with pseudo-science" list.