2012

Director Roland Emmerich has been spending most of his career destroying the world. With a major focus on North America. Not he takes his obsession to the extreme.

I will begin by saying that one of my guilty pleasures is disaster movies. Most of them have really bad story lines and characters but I just love seeing stuff being destroyed. Huge action set pieces where people run screaming from some sort of disaster. So for me this film was awesome. I was lucky enough to see it on a huge screen so that made it even better. The escape from LA scene was simply amazing. I had a the biggest grin on my face during that entire scene. Am I sick for wanting to watch masses of people being killed by falling buildings and shifting ground? As much as I love all the spectacular action there has not been a disaster film yet that can pull off a decent story or character development. And this film is no different. While this film is not completely terrible it is still not that good. Plus the film goes on for far to long so there is a lot more corny dialogue and silly situations. Roland and his co-writer Harald Kloser have tried to cram far too many characters in the film and so there are people in the film we did not need. A perfect example is Chiwetel Ejiofor's father and his friend on the cruise ship. While it gives Chiwetel a big emotional scene where he says goodbye to his dad, it was otherwise useless.

Now you don't go to these films for the acting. As long as the actor and scream pretty loud then they get the part. I must say that Roland has tried to class his film up a bit by casting some excellent actors. I'm a big fan of John Cusack. Most of his films have gone straight to DVD here lately so it is nice to see him on the big screen for a change. I'm also an Oliver Platt fan as well. He seems to ad a bit of dignity to his 'villain' role. Chiwetel Ejiofor is also excellent as the voice of reason. I also liked his scenes with Thandie Newton. Watching two English actors speaking with an American accent. Little things like that amuse me. Woody Harrelson is also perfectly cast as the conspiracy-theory-wacko.

As with most disaster films you don't go to see them for the intellectual thoughts that they raise. You just go to see stuff being destroyed and this is the ultimate disaster movie. I've heard Roland will no longer be making any more disaster films which is a good thing as I'm not sure how he could top this.