Saw it today and I liked it!! Parts of every disaster movie you've ever seen rolled into one (Poseidon Adventure, Titanic, Earthquake, Towering Inferno, etc.!) It was 2 hours and 40 minutes! Never a dull moment and a good story - hopefully far fetched. I was on the edge of my seat for most of it.
Good cast with good acting! Woody was perfect in his role. Hadn't seen George Segal in years! Cusack, Ejiofor and Glover were great!

John Cusack - (Jackson Curtis)
Chiwetel Ejiofor - (Adrian Helmsley)
Danny Glover - (President Wilson)
Amanda Peet - (Kate)
Thandie Newton - (Laura Wilson)
Oliver Platt - (Carl Anheuser)
Thomas McCarthy - (Gordon)
Woody Harrelson - (Charlie Frost)
Chin Han - (Lin Pang)
George Segal - (Tony Delgado)

I haven't seen it yet, but I plan to. It will be nice to escape reality for a couple hours, even if it is for a disaster movie LOL

Let me know what you think after you see it. Have fun!!

I love the two main kids in the movie! Is it weird that pretty much the only reason I want to see this movie is because of them? lol

I had wanted to see it, but after reading todays paper and saw it only got 2 stars, I was re-thnking.

Glad to hear you thought it was good Elliottsastar. Maybe I will give it a try.

I just happened to read the review of our local critic at the San Francisco Chronicle tonight and he had the guy standing on the chair which is the best review a movie can get. He also mentioned sitting on the edge of your seat as I did while also laughing even though the subject is no laughing matter. It was like going through a really exciting ride at Disneyland or Universal Studios. It was stressful and fun and exhausting at the end, but you're glad you took the ride!



'2012' is formula action movie turned up to 10
Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic

Friday, November 13, 2009



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2012
Sci-fi action. Starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Danny Glover. Directed by Roland Emmerich. (PG-13. 158 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

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It's hard to do justice to this ridiculous, wonderful movie. To describe "2012" is to make it sound like every other end-of-the-world disaster epic you've ever seen. And it is. It's a Roland Emmerich film very like his others - "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow" - about an epic, global catastrophe that begins ...

But wait. You already know how it begins: In a small room, a scientist looks at a computer screen and mutters ... "My God!"

Sure, you've seen this before, and yet you haven't, not quite like this. People talk about "formula" almost always as a pejorative, but formulas get to be formulas because they work, and there's something to be said for a formula picture done almost to perfection. In "2012," Emmerich gives you everything you expect, but gives it to you bigger.

Imagine a car racing through a neighborhood in Pasadena as the street and the houses behind it crumble into the center of the Earth. Imagine a plane taking off on a disintegrating runway - and having to fly around falling buildings and an unmoored elevated train. Imagine massive tidal waves sweeping through coastal cities and wiping out (you guessed it) major landmarks. Now imagine everything twice as grand as you're picturing it.

Sure, you'll laugh at "2012" - I laughed at it; laughing at it is part of the experience - but you'll do it from the edge of your seat.

This time, the core of the Earth is overheating. A government scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), working in concert with a colleague in India, calculates that soon the Earth's crust will destabilize. Entire continents will disappear, and other landmasses will migrate thousands of miles in the course of a day. This means the guaranteed death of billions and billions of people (and animals) and the end of the world as we know it.

Not surprisingly, the government, led by the president (Danny Glover), decides to sit on this information, and so for a good long stretch, the audience has the fun of knowing more than the characters. John Cusack plays Jackson, a sci-fi writer, who takes his kids to Yellowstone only to find that his favorite lake has dried up. Meanwhile, California is getting hit by a series of bizarre, localized earthquakes. In one spectacular early scene, a crevice opens up right down the center of a supermarket aisle.

Like Kentucky Fried Chicken, Emmerich does one thing, but he does it right. He inserts moments of welcome black comedy, as when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (played by a look-alike), somehow still in office, announces that the worst is over - only to be interrupted by the worst quake yet. And Emmerich makes sure that the special effects are nothing less than jaw-dropping. The scene of Cusack driving with his family as the world caves in behind him has to go down as one of the best CGI sequences ever filmed.

Along the way, Emmerich, who co-wrote the script with Harald Kloser ("The Day After Tomorrow"), tries to create a panorama of American life, from the hard-nosed government bureaucrat (Oliver Platt) to the whacked out, conspiracy-theory-loving radio host (Woody Harrelson). In one case, he goes too far: The tiny subplot about an old musician (George Segal, in a vague echo of Judd Hirsch in "Independence Day") belonged on the cutting-room floor.

But for a 158-minute movie, there's very little fat. And although it is true that "2012" is at its best in the first half, that first half is incredibly satisfying, and the second half doesn't flag. Emmerich's characters may be rough sketches, but he casts them well, and having people you care about at the center of a disaster makes the special effects that much more effective. You don't want to see Cusack and Amanda Peet fall into the Earth's core, after all.

At the same time, "2012" is a light film, with very little introspection and an upbeat tone that's undiminished by the implied slaughter of about 7 billion people. This is ludicrous, and yet it's interesting, in that it may signal a shift within the culture at large. For seven years following 9/11, we had a series of films depicting civic chaos and destruction, and these films were invariably downbeat or at least cautionary. (Even "The Day After Tomorrow" was about the threat of global warming.) In those years, within the context of a brainless action movie, you simply could not show an American landmark getting annihilated. People wouldn't stand for it.

Only an audience that feels invulnerable can enjoy watching on screen the wholesale destruction of its civilization and not take it as a threat. A cloud has lifted. It's safe to be happy and brainless again. "2012" may be Hollywood's first post-post-9/11 movie.

-- Advisory: This film contains extreme action sequences.


E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.