2012: Final (maybe) Thoughts

Lest you think I simply have an irrational hatred for Roland Emmerich and/or his movies, and would have panned 2012 regardless of whether it was actually good, I readily admit that when Independence Day hit the theaters in 1996, I paid to see it and I enjoyed the hell out of it. If I caught it on TV right now, I'd probably watch it again, and while I'd likely mock some of the goofier parts of it—and there are plenty of these—I'm sure I'd enjoy it again.

But Independence Day is, of course, thirteen years older than it used to be, and so am I. Tastes tend to change as we age, standards tend to become more refined.

I lived in a dormitory as a college freshman and sophomore; Independence Day came out during the summer between my first and second sophomore years.¹ Near the end of my freshman year (a bit more than a year before the movie was released) an acquaintance of mine from a few doors down the hall barreled through my half-opened door, wide-eyed, giddy, and a bit shocked, desperately looking to get his hands on a ruler and a camera.

I didn't have a camera—he ended up borrowing my roommate's—but I was about to hand him my ruler until he explained why he needed it: he wanted to measure and photograph, presumably so he could show his grandkids, the amazingly huge dump he'd just taken.

You probably can tell where I'm going with this unnecessary little story, but in case you can't, I'll spell it out: where people of a certain age (say, around twenty-one) might see the most amazing, astounding, exciting thing ever, a somewhat older, slightly more discerning person looking at the exact same thing may just see a big pile of shit.²

NOTES
1. This is not a typo—I was on the six-year college plan. And now I'm using the internet to criticize others for their underachievement, laziness, and stupidity. I think that's funny.
2. In case you're wondering—and who wouldn't be?—I never did try to catch a glimpse of the record-breaking turd, either live and in person or by tracking down the photograph. Some things are best left unknown, including about 75% of the things that go on in a dormitory bathroom.

Appetite for Destruction

WARNING: The following half-assed review of the half-assed movie 2012 contains a ton of spoilers, most of which you've probably already guessed. But if you haven't, and you don't want me to ruin the movie, here's a summary: don't go see it.

It’s with some shame that I admit to having recently seen 2012, director Roland Emmerich’s latest enthusiastic effort to destroy civilization. I do take some pride in the fact that I didn’t pay to see it—my boss paid for the tickets as part of our office Christmas party—but at the same time, my ticket was still paid for, and I feel bad about that.

My conscience would have been less troubled if we’d snuck into the theater for free, and managed to ruin the film for a big crowd . . . but what I would have needed to do to actually ruin this particular movie, as it turns out, is a little too disgusting to even contemplate, much less describe.

I’d like to say that I went into the theater unbiased and open-minded, but astute Bowling in the Dark readers would realize this was bullshit. I did my best, though, to keep an open mind—which in this case amounted to telling myself maybe it won’t be as shitty as you expect.

Boy, do I hate being wrong all the time.

Some might say—and, for all I know, may already have said—that Roland Emmerich is simply Austria’s answer to Michael Bay, infatuated with special effects rather than story, car crashes instead of credibility, explosions instead of, uh, something good that starts with “e.”

This is patently untrue. Emmerich is German. But he, like Bay, has shown that he’s dead set on blowing shit up regardless of the consequences to common sense, steadfastly and nobly refusing to let mundane details of science, logic, plot, characterization, or good dialogue get in the way of telling a bad story.

While Emmerich has directed at least a couple of movies that don’t feature the end of a major city, or a continent, or human civilization as we know it, he clearly has what can only be described as a raging, mega-huge boner for the apocalypse. For your reading pleasure, I’ve compiled a partial list, in no particular order, of things and places Roland Emmerich has damaged or destroyed in his movies and, in parentheses, what destroyed them:

• New York City (monument-destroying alien lasers)
  
• White House (ditto)
  
• Less awesomely-explosive parts of Washington D.C. (giant laser-induced fireball)
  
• New York City, again (giant lizard)
  
• Los Angeles (alien lasers)
  
• Area 51 (alien lasers)
  
• Los Angeles, again (tornadoes)
  
• New York City (water, then cold, then ice, then Russian freighters, then wolves)
  
• Al Gore’s credibility¹
  
• Two British helicopters (cold, more cold, and one dumbass opening the door to let in the cold)
  
• Los Angeles, again (earthquake, falling into the Pacific Ocean, insufficient buoyancy)
  
• That guy who played Bilbo Baggins (more cold)
  
• Yellowstone (volcanic explosion)
  
• Las Vegas, Nevada (earthquakes, liquid hot magma)
  
• Paris Casino, Las Vegas (budget constraints—too difficult and expensive to destroy the real Paris)
• Other less-important, non–New York City parts of the Northern Hemisphere
  
• White House, again (crushed by aircraft carrier)
  
• Woody Harrelson (volcanic explosion)
  
• Washington Monument (gravity, earthquake, tsunami—take your pick)
  
• Hawaii (liquid hot magma)
  
• Delhi, India (tsunami)
  
• St. Peter’s Basilica (heavy-handed anti-religious symbolism)
  
• Thousands of Italian Catholics crushed by toppling St. Peter’s Basilica (see above)
  
• Unsportsmanlike-Conduct Jesus statue, Rio de Janeiro (director’s need to destroy something religious in the Southern Hemisphere)
  
• Poor old bell-ringing Himalayan Buddhist monk, some 600 miles and 14,000 to 20,000 vertical feet from the ocean (tsunami, somehow)

The repetition in the above list suggests that human civilization really ought to build new photogenic monuments for moviemakers to destroy, but redundancy isn’t the biggest problem with 2012. And it’s not the convenient falling back onto one of its director’s favorite stock characters, the sniveling weasel politician—although he does that as well. (See below for examples, and see if you can pick out the Mad Scientist character!)


The biggest problem with 2012 is that it’s completely, utterly preposterous. And yes, I expect and even look forward to a tiny bit of preposterousness in my movies. Even a good disaster movie requires our willing suspension of disbelief, but this one asks for two and a half hours of suspension of thought . . . which is about fifteen minutes past my limit. The lowlights include, but are not limited to, the following examples:

• The Earth’s core overheats thanks to neutrinos. In real life, these particles pass through our bodies harmlessly by the tens of trillions every second, but in the movie they're dangerous because they’ve mutated. Mutated neutrinos. And they’ve mutated so that they heat up the core of the Earth, but nothing they pass through on their way to the center of the Earth—like, say, air, land, people, the oceans. 
• John Cusack’s limousine can outrun earthquakes, which may explain why it can make the a thirty-six-hour round trip from L.A. to Yellowstone and back—including a night’s stay—in what appears to be about twenty-four hours. 
• A twin-engine prop plane and a thirty-year-old camper outrun a pyroclastic flow.² At one point, John Cusack's character outruns it on foot. 
• The hellish volcanic firestorm that obliterates Yellowstone National Park, drops ash on Washington D.C. (2,200 miles away), and blots out the sun worldwide, musters only enough of a breeze locally to knock apocalypse nut Woody Harrelson giddily off his feet.³ 
• The entire surface of the Earth (which is, by my math, very large) shifts by thousands of miles in a matter of about twenty hours, conveniently placing the lost, crippled, low-on-fuel Russian cargo plane directly above its desired landing spot, without causing the slightest bit of catastrophic air turbulence. 

If you see this movie in the theater, that dull thumping you will hear is not a sub-woofer, it’s the sound of logic being kicked repeatedly in the crotch for 158 minutes.

All that said, though, I can’t bring myself to simply warn you away from this movie. It scored off the charts on the Unintentional Comedy Scale—I haven’t laughed so hard at a movie since The Hangover—and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy myself. But when you leave a movie about a global apocalypse and the near-end of the human race, is enjoyment really the right thing to be feeling? I don’t think so, which means either I’m a bit sick or 2012 was crap. So go check it out and let me know if I’m a bad person for getting a good belly laugh out of the end of the world. Do me a favor, though—if at all possible, sneak in without paying; you’ll help me sleep better tonight.

NOTES  

1. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth apparently re-used glacier footage from The Day After Tomorrow. The problem is that the glacier footage was wholly computer-generated—i.e. fake, made-up, not real—which strikes me as kind of a no-no in a documentary. And, of course, it should be noted that this particular fake footage was taken from a movie that had nothing to do with weather that could happen in the real world.  

2. A pyroclastic flow (a “fast-moving current of hot gas and rock” occasionally thrown out by erupting volcanoes) can travel at speeds up to 450 miles per hour—faster, even, than an American RV.  

3.The film tries to redeem itself a few moments later by incinerating Harrelson’s character on the spot, but I’m sorry, that’s just too little, too late.

2012: The End is (Not Actually) Near!

Less than two weeks remain before director Roland Emmerich barfs up his latest disaster film, 2012, onto a helpless and undeserving public, and I’m wondering what the reaction will be. I’m not talking about the critical reaction—I doubt it will fare any better than Stargate or The Day After Tomorrow, and probably worse—and I couldn’t care less how it does at the box office.¹

No, what I’m wondering about is the reaction from the crazy batshit bananas segment of the population, and whether that reaction will spread to the somewhat more reasonable but often still-fairly-silly general public.

Granted, nobody who watched Godzilla actually believed that a giant radioactive Pacific lizard was going to emerge from the ocean to lay waste to New York City. (Possibly because attacking, say, Los Angeles or the Bay Area would have made much more sense, geographically speaking, except in that weird movie-and-television world where everything on Earth (1) happens in English and (2) happens in New York City.) And I doubt that anybody who saw Watchmen left the theater worried that Dr. Manhattan had it in for all of us.²

But 2012 might be different.

First, because it pretends to be based on the alleged predictions of an ancient society, in this case, the Maya³. For whatever reason, we as a society seem to latch onto—and give some extra sliver of legitimacy to—stories that come from us from ancient peoples and/or the dimly lit, poorly understood corners of the world (and for most Americans, myself included, the world consists primarily of dimly lit, poorly understood corners). Who curses us ominously when we insult them, or with their dying breaths after we run them over with our cars? Clevelanders? Heck no—gypsies. Does Indiana Jones have to return crystal skulls to, say, Enid, Oklahoma? No, he has to take them to deepest, ancient, mystical South America.⁴ Warren Zevon sang about werewolves in London⁵ but it wasn’t a scary song. But if he’d sung about werewolves of Sczangdzk, the tiny haunted Czech province that I’ve just made up, we’d have gone nuts about it, assumed it was based on some Czech legend that was in turn based on a true story, and would have bought scads of tickets to the movie adaptation.⁶

Second, this movie is not just about ordinary run-of-the-mill everyday stuff like violence, widespread destruction, huge explosions, robots disguised as cars, horrific and logically impossible weather conditions, or Egyptians from outer space. 2012 is about the apocalypse. Now, the apocalypse is not a uniquely American obsession—as Dr. Stantz once observed, every ancient religion has its own myth about the end of the world, and I’m sure that (for example) plenty of Europeans got plenty worked up about the end of the world, way back when Europe actually gave a shit about things—but lately our end-of-the-world fascination seems to have a bit more polish than anybody else’s. I’m thinking here of the worries about the Y2K bug, or the fact that LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind series of books sold something like 65 million copies, despite being—based on the book(s) I read one afternoon—crap.⁷ I’d have plenty more examples if I weren’t so terribly lazy, but in short, America seems ripe for a explosion of 2012 mania.

Maybe I’m wrong about this. I’d be happy to learn that I’m not giving the American people enough credit, and 2012 will be easily dismissed as a breezy, lighthearted, fun little movie about the deaths of billions of people, rather than a prediction of it. Maybe this won’t spark the smoldering embers of lunacy you can find everywhere you look on the internet. Maybe, just maybe, we won’t have to endure three years’ worth of listening to everybody from obvious crackpots to supposedly rational people sound off on their fruitcake theories about how it’ll all end.

It’s not really going to matter to me, though; I won’t be able to hear any of it from my secret Armageddon-proof bunker, deep beneath the Earth’s crust. I’ll let you in if you can find it, and you bring Twinkies.

NOTES

1. Grammar note: if I wrote that “I could care less,” like a lot of people would, that would imply that, to some degree, however small, I actually do care. And I don’t. As the Squid Bandit would tell us, words have meanings.
2. Frankly, I left the theater wondering why Visionary Director Zack Snyder spent so much time digitally rendering Dr. Manhattan’s meat weasel, instead of just panning up a few inches (To soothe the good Doctor’s ego, let’s call it seven inches). For Dr. Brainsmart’s insightful review of Watchmen, please click on these words here.
3. Not “Mayans.” Maya. Honest!
4. I think. I’m not willing to watch the movie again to find out for sure.
5. I forget what it was called. Possibly “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.”
6. Directed by Roland Emmerich or, God help us, Michael Bay.
7. I realize it’s possible that the other eighty-seven books in the series may be better than the one or two I read. But I’d be quite surprised. And I’m not knocking the Bible or Christianity here, so rest your sphincters. I think that, in the right hands, a fictional series about a Biblical end of the world could be a fantastic read. But the Left Behind series was not in the right hands.

Ballooning into The Apocalypse

“I think what we're seeing here is an example of a culture for whom daytime talk shows and tabloid headlines have become a reality against which they measure their lives. A culture so obsessed by the media and a chance for self-dramatization that they'll do anything in order to gain a spotlight.”¹

It’s easy to dismiss Richard Heene—the alleged mastermind behind last week’s alleged “balloon boy” hoax that bamboozled hundreds of alleged journalists and fascinated tens of millions of alleged Americans—as the personification of a perfect storm of narcissism and stupidity, the evolutionary endpoint of an American obsession with television self-promotion, working madly to cobble together a harebrained publicity scheme without giving a second’s thought to just how quickly, how easily, or how spectacularly it could go wrong.

And it’s far too early to say that this isn’t the case—the facts wiggling gradually to light about Heene do plenty to support that argument. He and his family/co-conspirators have already made two appearances on the reality show Wife Swap,² and apparently had pitched his own reality television show to the TLC network. Whether or not that show was the same as the “Science Detectives” concept he and a couple of associates have been promoting, the description of Heene as “unapologetic self-promoter who would pursue all sorts of off-the-wall stunts to get media attention” doesn’t seem too far off base.³

But what people are overlooking is the possibility that not all of Richard Heene’s dogs are barking. According to the lawyer of Robert Thomas, one of Heene’s associates, Heene

“believes the world is going to end in 2012, [and because] of that, he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a bunker or something underground, where he can be safe from the sun exploding.”⁴

Yes, you read that right. This isn’t your standard garden-variety narcissism or TV obsession. This is what Mr. Heene’s legal team is likely to describe as the “crazy batshit bananas” defense. And it’s likely to get a lot of traction.

First of all, I’m not a physicist, but based on my rudimentary science education, (1) the sun is already exploding, because that’s more or less what the sun is,⁵ (2) it’s been exploding just like this, and will continue to do so, for billions of years. And if it turns out that I’m wrong about this, and the sun does turn into a supernova in just over three years, a bunker will not help. Even hiding a very deep bunker would be about as effective as holding tiny cartoon umbrella over one’s head, a la Wile E. Coyote.

I probably shouldn’t even get started in on the 2012 business. To put it briefly, several nutters—you can find them on the internet with a minimum of effort—have latched onto the belief that the end of the Maya calendar, on December 21, 2012, will be the beginning of the apocalypse. That Henne has heard of these theories about the 2012 Maya apocalypse is not a surprise; that he actually seems to believe them, despite a lack of any credible supporting evidence, suggest that he may well be one wave short of a shipwreck.⁶

It’s too early to be sure, of course. But it’s nowhere near too early for random strangers to post their poorly-informed opinions online. I’m throwing my hat into the ring right here. Hell, maybe I’ll get a TV show out of it.

NOTES

1. Agent Dana Scully, “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” The X-Files season five, episode five. By coincidence, Netflix shipped this episode to me two days ago.
2. I’m going to trust my sources on this one. On my third birthday I promised myself I’d never watch any show called “Wife Swap,” and so far I’ve stayed true to that.
3. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091016/ap_on_re_us/us_boy_in_balloon. I know, it’s lame, I’m basically just quoting hearsay that appeared online. Once I hire a staff of underpaid researchers, I’ll fire them for this sort of poor journalism.
4. http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_13599714. At least I’m referring to an actual newspaper this time—that counts for something, doesn’t it?
5. I have a very rudimentary science education.
6. Queen, “I’m Going Slightly Mad.”