Eye Candy #196 - "2012"

2012:  Yet another apocalypse flick from Roland “I vill destroy the vorld!” Emmerich, who gave us “Independence Day”, “Godzilla”, and the New York-frozen over “Day After Tomorrow”.  This time around it’s built upon the various 2012 destruction myths, with solar flares from the sun causing the core of the planet to liquefy, so that the various tectonic plates begin to shift radically, creating volcanoes in Yellowstone, massive earthquakes on the coasts, tsunamis, and just generally bad things, with plenty of recognizable landmarks destroyed for good measure.  John Cusack is Jackson Curtis, a limo driver/sci-fi author who ends up finding himself amidst the chaos, with a slight information edge over his fellow men because of a well-timed vacation to Yellowstone National Park and an encounter with a doomsday “groupie” (played by Woody Harrelson).  So it’s up to Jackson to keep ahead of the destruction, to escape with his family from Los Angeles to the location of several advanced “arks” being built by various governments to save 40,000 hand-picked individuals that are located in the Himalayas.  As with most of the movies of this type, rather than getting to any character really well, we get smatterings of all sorts of characters, usually prior to them being incinerated, crushed, or drowned, with a heavy dose of implausibility and disbelief.  Loses a lot on the small screen, as many of the special effects don’t have the same oomph.   Performances are fine, but it felt a lot like “Deep Impact” most of the time.  Still, there’s nothing new here, other than the scale of destruction.  Woodchuck sez, “Nothing to write home about.”