Is 2012 the Best Apocalypse Movie Ever?

Find out what Jim Slotek thought about Roland Emmerich’s latest end of the world blockbuster ‘2012‘.(http://www.ottawasun.com/entertainment/movies/2009/11/08/11673886-sun.html)

Roland Emmerich professes to be tired of blowing up the world.

It’s an ironic thought here, in the shadow of the Grand Tetons, the outer reaches of the Yellowstone Park super-volcano that some day will erupt in an extinction-level event. That dormant caldera plays an important part in the new movie 2012, Emmerich’s magnum opus, starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet as a couple trying to outrun worldwide catastrophe.

2012 opens in theatres on Friday.

The director of such doomsday tomes as Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow said he was initially reluctant to take on 2012, the disaster movie inspired by trendy paranoia over the end of the Mayan calendar on Dec. 21, 2012.

But then he realized, this was the movie where he could finally finish the job of total worldwide destruction.

“I only agreed finally to do it because it was such an incredible idea,” he says in his thick Teutonic accent. “And I said to myself, ‘If I do it one more time, I’ll do it the biggest way it can possibly be done. So maybe I have it out of my system.’

“For me, it’s never say never. But I have not the feeling that I will do something like this again.”

For those who take it seriously, there are many readings of the significance of the end of the Mayan calendar, from doomsday scenarios involving sunspot super-activity and such, to wide-eyed New Agey notions about the world entering a new state of consciousness (a la Shirley MacLaine and the “harmonic convergence” of the ’80s).

No points for figuring out which approach appealed most to Emmerich.

“It’s peculiar, 2012 is this date which there are a lot of ideas about. And we chose the destructive one, because destructive kind of works better in a movie.”

In fact, Emmerich and writer Harald Kloser seemingly worked in every destructive angle imaginable — starting with Earth Crust Displacement, a fringe theory that posits that earth’s tectonic plates can move suddenly and quickly with the right catalyst, sometimes over top of each other. “We found this theory which was big enough to cause all this flooding. And before we started writing a script, we actually met a professor of Earth Science at USC, and we asked him how that would unfold. And he told us he doesn’t believe in the Earth Crust Displacement theory.

“And I said, ‘That may be so, but could you give us some insight?’ And he said, ‘The only way this could work would be if neutrinos mutated,’ and some stuff about other kinds of particles. And from that moment on, all bets were off. No scientist would be able to say this could not happen, because it would never have happened before. This was the conceit we chose. These things, y’know, have to have some sort of feeling of believability. Like Jurassic Park, creating dinosaurs out of insects.”

So the upshot of the end of the world is that solar flares mutate neutrinos to boil the earth’s core, causing every semi-possible disaster in the world to happen at once — the eruption of Yellowstone, the slide of California into the ocean, even tidal waves engulfing the Himalayas.

(Even one 2012 doomsday scholar, Lawrence E. Joseph — who predicts a solar flare catastrophe that could knock out all the power-grids on earth for up to two years — chuckles and says that mutated neutrinos “are pretty far down on the list” of possible end-of-the-world catalysts).

Still, if you make your living off doomsday movies, who could resist making the equivalent of a multi-flavoured banana split with cherries, whipped cream and peanuts?

Rumoured to be nudging the $200-million budget mark, 2012 featured an entire cantilevered city block, so that seismic destruction could be shown in a non-CG format. And then there’s the usual destruction of international landmarks — in this case, as seen in the trailer, the White House (again) and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Emmerich jokes that he’s not a fan of organized religions. “I always find it funny when people say that. It’s not like I walk around (looking at landmarks) and saying, ‘Hey, I could destroy this, or I could destroy that.’ It always comes down to the story. Jackson Curtis (Cusack’s character) lives in L.A. and I live in L.A. and I think everybody in L.A. talks about “the Big One.” And I just decided to do that. And then Yellowstone Park was a good story too (the movie begins with divorced dad Cusack bringing his kids to Yellowstone to see his favourite lake — which turns out to have evaporated).

Oddly, with a combined body count in the billions in his movies, Emmerich says he likes to think of his movies as “celebrating life.

“What are the most important things in life? It’s about survival. Your normal regular persons become like heroes. And I think people can probably identify with that very well.”

He doesn’t consider it a spoiler to say some people survive. “You cannot make a movie like this and say at the end, ‘Everybody’s dead!’ You have to figure out a way, this is a modern retelling of Noah’s Ark, there are survivors and hope, which is exactly what we wanted to convey.”

Of course, if there’s another message, it’s don’t trust the government. In the movie, the world governments become privy to the pending Armageddon and conspire to save a few hundred thousand of their best (and richest) people. “The question is what’s savable and how should we save things. And I’m suspicious of governments, so this is an expression of that.”

Peet — who previously co-starred opposite Cusack in Identity and Martian Child — says she had misgivings about working for a director best known for blowing things up real good.

“I have to say I definitely talked to a couple of people beforehand to make sure Roland wasn’t some kind of scary, sadistic kind of director,” Peet says. “All the reports back were kind of incredible, that he was lovely and gentle and all things that seem to be completely antithetical to this kind of production.”

Cusack too professed surprise that Emmerich had so much facetime for the actors, with all the technical demands he had destroying the world. But it was definitely the “destroying the world” part that got him.

“I read the script, and by the end I actually got quite emotional. It was really intense. As you read it, interesting things would happen. They have this scene where Rome burned and Paris fell, and you think, ‘How are they going to shoot that?’ California falls into the ocean. It got bigger and bigger and the catastrophes got bigger. And the characters, the places where they could be safe, got smaller and smaller. So in a way, the movie actually got more intimate.”

So having given us the worst-case scenario, how does Roland Emmerich plan to spend Dec. 21, 2012?

“I will go to ski because it’s skiing season, and I will choose the highest mountain there is. If the world ends, what can I do? If not, I like skiing very much.”