2012 (spoilers)

[hongi]

Very long, could have done less with the talking and emotion and more with the 'boooooom! the end of the world!'. It's not even the 'plot' that annoyed me, it how they interspersed the action with loving, tender dialogue scenes over and over and over and over so that there's no tension.

Pleasantly surprised that they were so ready to kill off characters regardless of age, gender or race; the death toll is probably greater than any of Emmerich's previous movies combined.

It's worth watching just to see Yellowstone blow its top, but I have a feeling that the film doesn't do the real thing justice. I rolled my eyes at the car and the plane outrunning the pyroclastic flow though. I'm pretty sure that's impossible.

[Sea Skimmer]

Using the word impossible in reference to what happens a joke of a movie like this doesn’t make one lick of sense. I'm pretty sure you could say that about just about everything shown in the trailers already, which is as much of this film as I sure ever intend to see.

[dragon]

Very long, could have done less with the talking and emotion and more with the 'boooooom! the end of the world!'. It's not even the 'plot' that annoyed me, it how they interspersed the action with loving, tender dialogue scenes over and over and over and over so that there's no tension.

Pleasantly surprised that they were so ready to kill off characters regardless of age, gender or race; the death toll is probably greater than any of Emmerich's previous movies combined.

It's worth watching just to see Yellowstone blow its top, but I have a feeling that the film doesn't do the real thing justice. I rolled my eyes at the car and the plane outrunning the pyroclastic flow though. I'm pretty sure that's impossible.

Actually it's very possible as pyroclastic flows are not very fast, granted this is dependent on several factors such as density, terrain and others.

They are fast-moving fluidized bodies of hot gas, ash and rock (collectively known as tephra) which can travel away from the vent at up to 150 km/h.

link

In the case of the sample above I drive faster than that on the Autobahn here in Germany.

Mount St. Helens was even slower.

During the May 18, 1980 eruption, at least 17 separate pyroclastic flows descended the flanks of Mount St. Helens. Pyroclastic flows typically move at speeds of over 60 miles per hour (100 kilometers/hour) and reach temperatures of over 800 Degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius). Photographed here, a pyroclastic flow from the August 7, 1980 eruption stretches from Mount St. Helens' crater to the valley floor below.
USGS Photograph taken on August 7, 1980, by Peter W. Lipman.

pyroclastic flows with volumes of 1-10 cubic kilometers can reach distances of several tens of kilometers from a vent and travel downslope at speeds of 50 to more than 150 kilometers per hour, their velocity depending largely on their volume and on the steepness of slopes over which they travel.

link

[Adrian Laguna]

I was very interested in watching 2012 solely because the premise of whole surface of the Earth coming apart at the seams seemed to make for some magnificent scenery. I like watching things be destroyed in an impressive fashion. However, if the interesting parts full of destruction and mayhem are constantly interrupted by endless sappy dialogue, then I'll probably give it a pass.

[Sea Skimmer]

The main explosion at Mount St. Helens which was a form of pyroclastic flowreached over 300mph and portions of it may have briefly reached sound barrier. It was the latter flows which were much smaller and slower. In a full scale Yellowstone eruption meanwhile the pyroclastic flows would be staggeringly more powerful then anything we’ve had a chance to record in modern times. Some of the small explosions that caldara is known to have caused created craters over 5km in diameter. The crater of Mount St. Helens in comparison is only about 1,800 meters across. The large explosions its known to have caused in the last million years involved hundreds of cubic miles of rock being blown out. You would likely run out of gas before you could escape the suffocating levels of dust and ash all else aside. Its no joke that it'd basically kill everything in the western half of the US.

That second link you gave BTW cites 450mph as a max speed.

[Ford Prefect]

I'm trying hard to imagine how you end this film on any sort of positive note. I'm not going to see it, but does every character get killed by the conga line of immense natural disasters, or do they somehow manage to outrun the entire planet self-destructing?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

If you are east of the Cascades/Sierra Nevada and west of the Mississippi when Yellowstone goes up, you are either going to be dead or a fleeing refugee who will probably later die of white-lung. That much is certainly real enough.

[hongi]

One part of the movie that I sharply disagreed with: they showed the Queen on one of the Arks with her corgies, implying that she was a Paris Hilton esque idiot more concerned with her dogs. I despise the monarchy, but I know that she'd stay in Britain with the British people. The director badly misjudged her.

I'm trying hard to imagine how you end this film on any sort of positive note.

That's the hilarious part. Only Hollywood could turn 6 billion dead into a hopeful ending.

I'm not going to see it, but does every character get killed by the conga line of immense natural disasters, or do they somehow manage to outrun the entire planet self-destructing?

A bit of both. The famiy are the main characters, and by some extreme luck they manage to survive the destruction by and large, but there are other significant characters who die in various ways.

If you are east of the Cascades/Sierra Nevada and west of the Mississippi when Yellowstone goes up, you are either going to be dead or a fleeing refugee who will probably later die of white-lung. That much is certainly real enough.

They basically portrayed the initial moments of the explosion as a gigantic H-bomb, complete with a mushroom cloud on top of a mushroom cloud on top of a mushroom cloud. I probably would have stayed to see it, like that crazy dude did. It's not everyday that you get to watch the greatest fireworks show on Earth.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Interestingly, even though Ebert tends not to like Big Dumb CGI movies, and he has better reason than almost anyone to have a permanent hate-on for Roland Emmerich, he gave 2012 3.5 stars.

Excerpts from his review:

It's not so much that the Earth is destroyed, but that it's done so thoroughly. "2012," the mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set-up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly.

This is fun. "2012" delivers what it promises, and since no sentient being will buy a ticket expecting anything else, it will be, for its audiences, one of the most satisfactory films of the year. It even has real actors in it. Like all the best disaster movies, it's funniest at its most hysterical. You think you've seen end-of-the-world movies? This one ends the world, stomps on it, grinds it up and spits it out.
[...snip...]
The bottom line is: The movie gives you your money's worth. Is it a masterpiece? No. Is it one of the year's best? No. Does Emmerich hammer it together with his elbows from parts obtained from the Used Disaster Movie Store? Yes. But is it about as good as a movie in this genre can be? Yes. No doubt it will inflame fears about our demise on Dec. 21, 2012. I'm worried, too. I expect that to be even worse than Y2K.

[tim31]

If you wanted proof that Ebert doesn't hold a grudge, there you have it.

[Zor]

A couple of thoughts...

-The Idea behind the dissaster seems like a piece of Technobable taken right out of a Voyager script.

-The Arks. I like them. They look pretty sweet and suprisingly fuctional looking for ships in a sci-fi movie with their purpose in mind. Even if they do strike me as being somewhat as being Axiom knockoffs, loading in the rear like that makes little sense instead of loading from the top and the smokestacks do seem odd. Everything about their role to me says "Make them Nuclear", as fossil fuels would be in REAL short supply afterwards. Also, you could probably build a few dozen more of them in other areas like the Siberian Plains, maybe even in existing big capacity shipyards with the cover story of "New Stormproof supertankers".

-landing on Hawaii. It did seem kind of daft to me to go land in the Hawaiin Islands. If volcanos are going off worldwide, i am sure at least someone would have thought that one of the biggest and most well known lava spitters on earth would be spitting errupting.

-Handing out gasmasks. If their is volcanic ash falling like snow, give them out en mass to at least rescue workers.

-Planes going off Cliffs. The director has a fetish for this.

Also, they are apparently planning on making a TV Series

Finally, why is this not in sci-fi?

Zor

[CaptainChewbacca]

A couple of thoughts...

-The Idea behind the dissaster seems like a piece of Technobable taken right out of a Voyager script.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the disaster in the movie pretty much just the Nemesis Theory?

[Zor]

A couple of thoughts...

-The Idea behind the dissaster seems like a piece of Technobable taken right out of a Voyager script.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the disaster in the movie pretty much just the Nemesis Theory?

I thought this would be the case, but no, the idea is that a new catagory of sub atomic particle from increased solar activity is causing the core of the planet to heat up and screws around with techtonic plates.

Zor

[Ghost Rider]

I really have to wonder why Ebert gave it 3.5, then again the man thought Watchmen rated a 4.

Either way, saw the movie because friend's birthday and this is the movie they chose. Okay....the scope is small for an end of the world epic. They show Cali, some of Vegas, Yellowstone, DC, and a few other places, but given this is supposed to be literally massive everywhere, it's damned small in comparison to the drawn out "THE FAMILY IS IN DANGER!!!". Holy fuck it was "Oh noes, stupid someone did stupid something they are all gonna die dontchaknow! What do mean you feel as much tension as the sun rising in the east?". No, really there were some events, the family does something, the other character are driven and back to oh wait the family again getting into more mishaps!.

If you saw the trailers you got the best part as the super explosion of the caldera was blah at best. In fact the trailers pretty much showed the only parts of scenery getting blown up as the rest gets....flooded.

[Big Orange]

I really have to wonder why Ebert gave it 3.5, then again the man thought Watchmen rated a 4.

Ebert panned Roland Emmerich's earlier movies such as Stargate and Independence Day, so Emmerich oh-so wittily struck back at Ebert and the late Siskel in the turgid Godzilla through the bumbling NY politicians played by Michael Lerner and Lorry Goldman (their characters even had the same first names).

2012 does not interest me at all, it looks a lot more bloated and pofaced than The Day After Tomorrow and extremely dull, like Twister (1996).

[Phantasee]

How is John Cusack in the movie? When I found out he was starring in it I went from "Fuck no" to a "Maaaybe...".

[Ghost Rider]

How is John Cusack in the movie? When I found out he was starring in it I went from "Fuck no" to a "Maaaybe...".

He sucks. If one goes by that his best is still Grosse Point Blank, but he doesn't even have much of the humor or anything really. Sure a couple scenes you can see his acting ability, but the rest could've been done by any pasty white guy playing the *Down in the dumps ex husband*.

[El Moose Monstero]

I enjoyed it, I know I shouldn't have, but I actually did. I went knowing exactly what I was going to get, and I got it - a cliched hack mishmash of bad acting, disaster film cliches and stereotypes, even a healthy dose of stock hollywood US-centrism to go with it. All tied together by disaster porn which I could both marvel and sneer at. Although out of all the disaster porn, the initial earthquake was by far the best of the bunch, at least until they took off, whereafter it became very clearly a flyby and overlay, where as the car scene I was totally immersed in.

The yellowstone supereruption failed to tick my boxes, and most of the special effects after the initial earthquake weren't quite as good. I actually got a lot fun seeing Hawaii covered in lava, although you might have thought that instead of busting out of the old volcano on Oahu, the magma might have gone path of least resistance via the already active volcanoes.

All in all, this year's guilty pleasure movie for me. As others have voiced though, they could have just picked one disaster, or they should have been a lot more global in scope - screw Yellowstone, show us every volcano on the planet suddenly spouting ash and lava whilst km tall waves crash around them and the very ground itself splinters and cracks, fountaining even more lava. Bollocks to realism, don't pretend to have science with magic neutrinos, if you're saying a particle did it, we never even have to know what the particle was. There was a creepy bit at the end of Last and First Men where the sun gets a stellar plague, that was it, all the explanation there was, and starts to die. Just give us something like that, an unusual anomaly passing through the planet.

[Lusankya]

All in all, this year's guilty pleasure movie for me. As others have voiced though, they could have just picked one disaster, or they should have been a lot more global in scope - screw Yellowstone, show us every volcano on the planet suddenly spouting ash and lava whilst km tall waves crash around them and the very ground itself splinters and cracks, fountaining even more lava.

If it interests you, Japan already made the movie you're talking about. They then solve the problem with a suitable application of nuclear weapons. Shep would probably approve.

[Gil Hamilton]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the disaster in the movie pretty much just the Nemesis Theory?

No, the official explanation in the movie was that an absurdly active solar cycle caused the Earth to be bombarded by a vastly larger amount of neutrinos than normal, melting the Earth's Core and causing the crust to break up. This causes Tibet to move to Hawaii's location in less than an hour (so Asia was booking at about 8500 kilometers an hour) and Wisconsin to be the new magnetic South Pole (granted the magnetic poles flipped). You heard me.

[CaptainChewbacca]

If asia is moving at 8500 kph, wouldn't the acceleration just kill everyone, or when someone fell and was hit by the wall behind them moving at 8500 kph?

[Gil Hamilton]

If asia is moving at 8500 kph, wouldn't the acceleration just kill everyone, or when someone fell and was hit by the wall behind them moving at 8500 kph?

Spoiler

It was a plot contrivance, really. They wrote themselves into a corner by having the characters need to fly from Las Vegas to Tibet on one tank of fuel, which they ran out of at Hawaii, when they discovered that the entire island chain was nothing buy molten rock. Then when we cut back to them after some other scenes, the pilot goes something to the effect of "The continents have been shifting and oh yes, it coincidentally put us really, really close to our target destination in China." In other words, the movie plotholed China to Hawaii's location while they were putting along on vapors. However, everyone who happened to be on those landmasses were fine until the global tsunamis of death that were big enough to cover the Himalayas hit. In fact, the Dali Lama wasn't even disturbed from the pillow he was snoozing on.

[Zor]

Well, according to Box Office Mojo Box Office Mojo this film has already made $225 million.

Zor

[J Ryan]

If asia is moving at 8500 kph, wouldn't the acceleration just kill everyone, or when someone fell and was hit by the wall behind them moving at 8500 kph?

Spoiler

It was a plot contrivance, really. They wrote themselves into a corner by having the characters need to fly from Las Vegas to Tibet on one tank of fuel, which they ran out of at Hawaii, when they discovered that the entire island chain was nothing buy molten rock. Then when we cut back to them after some other scenes, the pilot goes something to the effect of "The continents have been shifting and oh yes, it coincidentally put us really, really close to our target destination in China." In other words, the movie plotholed China to Hawaii's location while they were putting along on vapors. However, everyone who happened to be on those landmasses were fine until the global tsunamis of death that were big enough to cover the Himalayas hit. In fact, the Dali Lama wasn't even disturbed from the pillow he was snoozing on.

Spoiler

To be fair they were expecting to have to ditch in the South China Sea. When they find out they are over land the pilot says the continent moved over 1,000 miles. I've no idea where this 8500 kph figure has come from.

[Gil Hamilton]

Spoiler

To be fair they were expecting to have to ditch in the South China Sea. When they find out they are over land the pilot says the continent moved over 1,000 miles. I've no idea where this 8500 kph figure has come from.

The time it minimum time it takes China to move to the position of Hawaii, which is where they said they were running on fumes (hint: Hawaii to South China Sea is not a trip you can make when you are basically out of fuel). However, is all of Asia moving 1000 miles really that much better? That still means the continent was moving faster than the speed of sound.