2012

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Movies

Top action from Washington Clooney is convincing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Mystery and melancholy War horse Master director lights up the screen Holmes sequel an opportunity wasted Streep makes a riveting Iron Lady Soaring to the challenge Feast of films sure to suit all tastes

With the preposterously silly but eyeball-entertaining orgy of destruction of 2012, the disaster movie joins fantasy, comicbook and animation films as genres revolutionised by computer graphic effects.

The wonders of digital imagery made possible - and convincingly so - such successes and screen miracles as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Spider-Man movies and any of the Pixar films (most recently Up and Wall-E).

Now comes the latest apocalyptic thriller - and thanks to its spectacular digital sequences, it is the most "effective" disaster movie to screen so far.

Director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) turns a new end-of-the-world scenario into catacylsmic catastrophes, including devastating earthquakes, erupting volcanoes and mountainous tsunamis.

The title comes from a Mayan calendar prediction that the world will end as we know it on December 21, 2012 (you might want to make a diary reminder) - and here that takes the form of the Earth's core heating up to such an extent that it causes super-seismic destabilisation and shifts in the Earth's crust.

As terrific as these sequences are, 2012 is typical of previous disaster movies when it comes to its human drama. An actor might want to add digital effects to W C Fields' famous advice to never work with animals or children.

Doing their best in cliched circumstances are John Cusack and Amanda Peet in a fractured family; Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover and Oliver Platt as a leading scientist, the US president and an unscrupulous politician, respectively; plus disparate other characters including a crazy doomsday believer played by Woody Harrelson.

In the midst of all the environmental mayhem, the story momentarily questions who would have the chance to escape death - the worthy, the most desirable, the lucky or the rich? - but, thankfully, such gratuitous, superficial and out-of-sync moments of grey-matter exercise occur very infrequently.

In between the spectacles, the story has its share of perilous excitement, more often ludicrous than tense. But Emmerich knows how inane and over the top much of the movie is and, for the most part, he smartly couches the action in a humour that says don't take this seriously, folks, just sit back, chomp on your popcorn and enjoy the big dumb fun.

- © Fairfax NZ News