2012 030210

India, 2009: a geologist visits his astrophysicist friend in India and is told something startling. The sun has started producing a normally harmless form of radiation in such a large quantity that the earth’s solid center core is now melting which will cause it to expand and swell against the crust. Government heads are informed and preparations are made. Fast forward three years. John Cusack is an out of work writer on a camping trip with his estranged children. He meets a strange hermit, Woody Harrelson, who starts rambling about his conspiracy theories involving the US government and the approaching apocalypse. Soon after, the world literally starts falling apart and John is fighting to keep his family alive through it all.

I went into this movie expecting to be positively biased. I love John Cusack. I love Roland Emmerich, the director. I’m also partial to disaster flicks and this was one heck of a disaster flick. It was easily twice as awesome a spectacle as Day After Tomorrow and had none of the politics. Beyond the spectacle, it once again exhibited Emmerich’s great gifting as a director. He’s very well aware that you can make an amazing visual spectacle but that’s not enough to keep people’s interest. What you need is the human dynamic and characters that you like and identify with. Emmerich is a master of the ensemble cast, and seems to effortlessly both keep up with and develop the incredibly large number of characters in all of his movies. This is no exception, with just about every death that you see affecting you emotionally without you feeling manipulated.

Now, some of the characters are a touch cliched. The good scientist, the bad selfish scientist, the humanitarian chick, the father, the kids who don’t like the father, the mother etc. We’ve seen all the characters before but I’m okay with that. Some of the dialogue was almost expectedly bad but I didn’t really care because I’m still recovering from GI Joe. Don’t watch that.

With spectacular special effects and engaging characters this movie is totally worth watching. A- because I gave Zombieland an A and it wasn’t quite that cool.