‘2012’: A 15-Year Retrospective on the End-of-the-World Spectacle

The disaster movie to top all disaster movies

Sony Pictures

It may sound hard to believe now, but there was a time when the Mayan’s 2012 end-of-the-world prophecy was enough to stoke paranoia in the eyes of the masses. The cryptic ending of their ancient calendar served as a springboard for momentous, Armageddon-style musings.

It may not have been quite the scare as Y2K in the year 2000, but as a late millennial, there’s no other apocalypse from within my lifetime toward which I’m so shamelessly partial. From Nostradamus’ 1999 doomsday predictions to Harold Camping’s 2011 predictions — not to mention the black hole on earth some feared in 2008 with the introduction of the Large Hadron Collider — the 2012 end of the world prophecy still holds a certain je ne sais quoi in my heart.

Of course, that may be in no small part due to the 2009, Roland Emmerich-directed, John Cusack-starring film. Created by the mind behind movies such as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and Godzilla (1998), it’s likely needless to clarify for a contemporary reader that the film provides a less-than-accurate detailing of what would occur in 2012 when that eponymous date ultimately came to pass.

When the sun set on schedule on December 21st, 2012, cynical eyes across the world rolled in unison when cataclysmic earthquakes and planet-drowning monsoons never arrived. And when the sun rose anew on December 22nd, it was clear we’d survived yet another doomsday in cavalier defiance.

The movies that predict the near future open themselves to a certain judgment as the years they depict finally arrive. Of course, Back to the Future and Blade Runner haven’t lost their greatness just because the hoverboards and flying cars they predicted never quite made their way to stores. But it does beg the question, “Couldn’t they have set their stories a little further in the future? Did Timecop really need to take place in 2004?”

Dune grants itself the luxury of making sci-fi predictions whose validity we can’t evaluate for a healthy 8,000 years. Once the 10190s arrive, we can begin assessing the story’s applicability. iRobot’s forecasts of a full-blown robot uprising in 2035 could have at least spared our psyches a century and let us wait until 2150 to pass verdicts on singularities and weapon-wielding robots.

But it’s the 1984s, 2001: Space Odysseys, and 2012s that have the most conspicuous expiration dates for their predictions. At least with the former two movies, they had the benefit of a few decades passing in between their release and reexamination before people could raise complaints like “Hey, wait a minute, I wanted to go to Jupiter with my cool AI rocket and all we got was 9/11!”

But in 2012’s case, the 2009 film lost much of its intrigue and fear factor by 2013’s arrival. Yet even with a title rendered slightly laughable by a mere four years’ passage of time, 2012 is a film for which I have an unrepentant weakness.

Escapism runs most deeply in the films where the world is at peril and the literal objective becomes: “escape.” And in 2012, whether in a limo, RV, plane, bigger plane, or even bigger boat, escape they most certainly and desperately do.

With only brief moments of reprieve throughout the film’s first two acts, the end of the world destruction is always following close behind our family of protagonists. As with the expert-marksman-who-misses-the-target-with-every-shot trope, the end-of-times revelry is rarely more than a few feet behind the C+ performance family.

In addition to the world crumbling in on itself, Jackson, played by Cusack, is forced to reconcile with his floundering family life and his wife’s new boyfriend, Gordon, played by Tom McCarthy. While a likable enough guy during his screen time, Gordon’s timely dispatching will hardly come as a sore point for most audiences. Even after being brutally crushed, his prospective wife-to-be is among the very first to forget about the kindly father figure.

Disaster movies are scarcely thoughtful; among them, 2012 doesn’t exactly distinguish itself in its cohesion. While arguably more logical than Moonfall’s plot of “What if… the moon came crashing to earth,” 2012 leaves something in the writing department still to be desired.

But while it isn’t the most logical or well-thought-out of the disaster movies, there’s a strong argument to be made that it is at least the most disaster-y. Few disaster films tell such high-octane stories of crazy, off-the-wall, earth-eviscerating destruction. 100 raging Godzillas and half of the villains in the Marvel universe couldn’t create such a senseless excuse for monument-toppling spectacle as the Emmerich film musters.

Originally the movie was conceived as being based on the biblical flood (remnants of which can still be seen in the film’s escape vessels, indiscreetly called arks). But with the year 2012 on the horizon and a penchant for the apocalyptic pseudo-archeology tale, Fingerprints of the Gods, Emmerich decided to combine a few end-of-the-world scenarios in one to create an ultimate, unparalleled calamity.

The film is nothing if not ambitious. Where many disaster films remain centered within single cities, 2012 creates a borderless chaos that strikes an international appeal. But in its piecemeal depictions of nearly every culture, it’s not a global appeal that runs very deeply. In fact, in the decade and a half since the film was released, it doesn’t quite seem to have left the lingering stain on psyches that it did for that 13-year-old me.

Seeing ships and aircraft carriers toppled by colossal waves that washed over landmarks and swelled to the heights of the Himalayan mountains, my popcorn went stale in my lap as I kept my eyes glued deliriously to the screen.

Watching the movie as an adult, it’s hard to see quite the irreproachable greatness I once did. I’m in no rush to remove it from my list of 100 favorite movies. But few will sanely argue Emmerich’s tale of peril, spectacle, and shoddy, familial reunion as one of the all-time greats.

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This article was originally published on Medium.

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