Mini-Review: 2012

Warning: Potential Spoilers.
Move along if you don't like it.

We bought 2012 on dvd the other day and I rather liked it despite some mega-watt plot and logic holes. Anyone who follows my mini-reviews knows that I am a stickler for logic. You might remember how I bashed the much-loved Star Trek movie. :shudders:

2012 is about Jackson Curtis, an author who wrote his own apocalyptic novel and sold 500 copies of his book (in hardback, no less). (Yeah, I couldn't stop laughing either.)

To supplement his income, he makes his living chauffeuring an obscenely wealthy Russian and his two brat kids.

Piecing together the evidence, which includes increasing number of earthquakes, assurances from the government that the worst is over (that would've been my first clue), conversations with the two Russian brat kids, and a conspiracy theorist who is also warning people about a cataclysm, Jackson is convinced the world is going to end, but there are secret ships available for a lucky few. He grabs his two kids, his ex-wife and her boyfriend as they race time to beat the tectonic shifts of the earth's mantel.

I promise you, you will be tired from escaping one near miss after another. If you're normal, you won't mind the glaring logic flaws, like pyroclastic clouds that never seem close enough to asphyxiate our heroes, nor does it bring down the planes, limousines or recreational vehicles they drive. Yet, people who are a stone's throw away from them die miserably.

You won't care that not only is the planet's mantel super-heating and collapsing at an immense rate, but it then cools and settles at an even faster speed. And while every satellite in orbit is telling them the whole planet is falling apart, somehow an entire continent survives almost entirely intact. Please! (I was THIS close to throwing popcorn at my tv.)

And you won't care when they tell you this whole thing started from solar flares imbued with neutrinos which then mutated. umm...Neutrinos decay. They don't mutate.

If you're normal, you won't care about any of these things.

On the other hand, if you're like me and Greg, you will repeatedly pause the movie and yell at the writers for not doing their homework.

I have a soft spot for apocalyptic fiction and movies. (That's obvious, since my first book, Touch Of Fire is post-apocalyptic.)

My gripe with most apocalypse movies (and some fiction) is that the writers always want to tie up the loose ends and give it a happy ever after.

No matter how gritty or how honest the portrayal, at the end they always fall back on giving us the 'Skittles' rainbow at the end of the story.

That irks the heck out of me. I like apocalyptic stories that offer hope, but spare me the sugar-coated, 'and we all lived happily, morally, kumbaya-ly ever after'.

Life doesn't work that way. It never has.

2012 threw in a few undeserved pink bow ties at the end, but they also showed great sacrifices by good and bad guys so it did redeem itself in that regard.

It's worth renting if you like thrilling, disaster movies. It's worth buying for the special effects alone. I'll probably be having surreal dreams for weeks now. LOL.

Despite the logic gaps and a little too much moralizing, it had enough adventure to want to see it again.

Did you see this movie? What did you think?