2012 (2009)

Saw this movie “2012” today in DVD. It is yet another Dooms Day movie that predicts that the world will end soon, this one says it will end in 2012 courtesy the Mayan calendar. Roland Emmerich, the director who created many other doomsday films like Independence Day (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) has directed this thriller. The story is about an American geologist learning from an Indian astrophysicist that neutrinos from a massive solar flare are causing the temperature of the Earth’s core to increase rapidly and very soon the whole of earth’s surface will change without recognition. World will be flooded up to Mount Everest in height and will wipe out civilization. Based on this information international leaders begin a secret project to ensure humanity’s survival by being locked in board ships called “arks” that are constructed at Cho Ming, Tibet in the Himalayas.

Just like many other Hollywood movie, this one too has Los Angeles & Las Vegas being destroyed first due to the catastrophe; does even the nature start with a sorted order on wealth and wealthy?. There are lot of missing dots and questions in the story line for me – if the “Arks” are the way to safety, why do they need to delay till last minute to begin boarding and why board it in Tibet?; If the earth surface is opening up and gobbling everything, how come Curtis family alone escape it in all the instances; Flying obviously seems to be the safe route, if so why Curtis family alone are in the air, why not many other thousands of private planes around the world and so on…

I liked the scene where the American Chief of Staff first seeing the “Arks” in China remarks something like “You got to leave it to Chinese to build something this massive, which I thought was impossible in the time-frame”, indicating that China is world’s factory even for a project as important as saving the humanity. The movie does make the viewer ponder (philosophically) what each of us will feel/do when we know that the whole world is going to get destroyed shortly and there is little we can do about it.

Overall the movie was quite enjoyable and nicely produced. Worth watching if you like science fiction.