0:00: The cover of the 2012 DVD (pictured above) shows Tibet getting hilariously pwned by a tsunami while a monk looks on haplessly. Is it too conspiratorial to theorize that this is a sly attempt to boost the movie's appeal to Chinese audiences?
:30: The credit sequence is a bunch of shots of planets. Is the solar system secretly working for the Mayans?
2:00: Hey, it's Chiwetel Ejiofor, universally beloved for his lead performance in David Mamet's Redbelt! He's apparently playing the Jeff Goldblum role in this movie. Neutrinos are coming from the sun and heating up the Earth's core!
5:50: Oliver Platt has fallen a long, long way from the heady days of Lake Placid.
8:00: Danny Glover is playing the Bill Pullman role. He's giving a grave speech to the G-8 about the world ending.
10:15: There have been approximately 15 scenes in the last 10 minutes, establishing what will no doubt prove to be a totally necessary cast of characters.
12:40: John Cusack, in the Will Smith role, is running late! His regular car won't start, so he has to drive a limo for some reason. Also, his ex-wife won't get off his back. Women!
16:30: One of these backstories is apparently about a conspiracy to use the end of the world to steal famous works of art. No, really.
20:15: Back to Danny Glover's White House. I've noticed that most of the characters in this movie are pretty much the same characters as in Independence Day, except the ones who were white in that movie are now black and vice versa.
24:00: John Cusack and his kids went on a hike in Yellowstone National Park and stumbled upon Chiwetel Ejiofor's secret geology study, which is located on a massive and easily visible location. They talk about John Cusack's book. No, really.
26:15: "All our scientific advances, all our fancy machines. The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago." - actual dialogue
28:00: Woody Harrelson is playing a kooky character because of course he is. No disasters yet, but John Cusack is apparently getting WiFi in the middle of Yellowstone National Park. His kids are bitching about how much they hate being children of divorce. Fucking kids.
32:00: Woody Harrelson is showing off his "blog," which is actually a Flash animation, to John Cusack. He's telling John Cusack about all the ways in which this movie plans to rip off Deep Impact.
36:45: Scott Templeton from The Wire is John Cusack's ex-wife's annoying new husband. Also, finally an effects shot, set in a supermarket to best facilitate a product placement for Vault energy drinks. It looks fake and stupid.
40:25: All the rich people in the world have been briefed on the end of the world ahead of time and are conspiring to consolidate their power after the cataclysm. Did Naomi Klein write this movie? John Cusack turns out to be a limo driver for a bunch of rich Russian stereotypes and their annoying kids say something that reflects Woody Harrelson's conspiracy theory so John Cusack automatically makes the assumption that it's completely true.
45:30: First big action sequence! It combines a bunch of CGI destruction with rear-projected reverse shots of John Cusack pretending to drive while yelling. Then Scott Templeton from the Wire has to fly a plane out of LA at low altitude as it collapses into the ground, because he hasn't had enough lessons to fly upward. More reaction shots of John Cusack yelling "whoooa."
53:00: Chiwetel Ejiofor's father, a jazz musician on a cruise ship, is introduced to dispense some standard wise old black man wisdom. And John Cusack is going back to Yellowstone to get Woody Harrelson who has some map to the rich people rocket ships. I like how the movie completely skipped over the logic of John Cusack going to Wyoming to take his kids camping instead of one of the many national parks in California.
57:00: Now there's a big volcano blast that looks like a nuclear explosion and throws off comets that John Cusack has to outrun in an RV to get to the airstrip. This action sequence has exactly the same premise as the one 10 minutes ago, but subs in a volcano for an earthquake.
1:05:00: I should mention that the compositing in this movie is horrible. It's about at the level of Conan O'Brien's old bit where he drives his desk around.
1:08:34: Danny Glover is praying in the White House chapel and sharing a pointless nostalgic anecdote with Chiwetel Ejiofor. Glover's idea of portraying gravitas involves standing like he has a rod in his ass and talking like he's recovering from laryngitis. It's something less than convincing. He's delivering a dramatic address to the nation which mercifully cuts out while he's quoting the Bible as something that represents all the faiths of the world.
1:10:23: Third "collapsing airfield" shot of the movie!
1:17:15: An airport control tower was just exploded by volcanic ash somehow.
1:18: 04: Remember when our heroes were flying out of a collapsing LA at low altitude? Get ready for a thrilling sequence of our heroes flying out of a collapsing Las Vegas at low altitude!
1:22:03: Now there's a dialogue sequence between John Cusack's ex-wife and a tertiary Russian trophy girlfriend character. Did anything they shot for this movie get left on the cutting room floor?
1:26:30: Now they're flying over Honolulu, which is being melted down by another volcano. They ought to have named this movie John Cusack Watching Buildings Collapse From The Air. It has an avant-garde quality to it.
1:29:10: Danny Glover's President is now helping to locate the missing father of a little girl. I can't remember the last time I wanted a character in a movie to die so badly.
1:31:05: Vatican City falls apart, crushing the Pope and a bunch of people praying. Most movies would probably choose to either emphasize the power of faith and the human spirit or show the futility of human endeavor in the face of certain death. Not only does 2012 do both, it does so within the same scene and does this over and over again.
1:34:29: Danny Glover finally dies, in the front lawn of the White House, after a huge wave drops an aircraft carrier on top of him. Yes, really - it's awesome. His last words: "Dorothy, I'm coming home." I presume the context for that was in one of the many speeches he gave that I tuned out in the first half of the movie.
1:41:13: The latest plot point: John Cusack and the rich Russians are about to run out of fuel in the middle of the ocean, but come to find out that the Earth's crust has shifted a thousand miles and now they're right where they need to be to catch the spaceship, which is in China. Can't argue with plotting like that!
1:47:40: This movie's commitment to maudlin nostalgic dialogue exchanges is truly heroic. Each of the roughly ten thousand characters has had at least one, and all the black characters have had at least three.
1:52:22: Now a minor character who was onscreen for 30 seconds in the first ten minutes of the movie gets a dramatic death scene.
1:55:10: John Cusack and Scott Templeton from The Wire are bonding over the fact that John Cusack's kids love him despite the fact that Scott Templeton from The Wire actually gives a shit about being a father figure. They're in the back of a pickup truck driven by a Tibetan monk we met in the first act. Also, John Cusack's ex-wife wheedles their way onto one of the spaceships, which are apparently really just big boats, by appealing to Asian mysticism.
2:01:45: Now Chiwetel Ejiofor is making an impassioned speech about altruism and humanity, which everyone listens to despite the fact that they're supposedly 15 minutes away from certain death. And they all agree to open the gates to save everybody in the immediate vicinity, who I guess are mostly rural Chinese peasants and some of the rich people who paid to be on the ship.
2:04:14: The gate winds up crushing Scott Templeton from the Wire to death.
2:08:40: "What is happening? What's going on?" - actual, and apropos, dialogue
2:11:19: Now they're running around the interior of the ship while it's flooding, in a sequence that seems blatantly ripped off from Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon, which I guess they can get away with because nobody saw that movie.
2:12:30: Also, Hollywood can't do CGI water for shit.
2:16:10: John Cusack is going on a "suicide mission" to unjam the gate that killed Scott Templeton from The Wire and is preventing the ship's motors from engaging, which means the ship can't avoid slamming into Mt. Everest. He manages to squeeze in a maudlin speech to one of his kids beforehand.
2:23:00: John Cusack saves the day, but is taking too long to come up for air and everyone is worried that he's dead, except for anyone who's ever seen a movie before.
2:26:30: Flashforward to 27 days past the apocalypse, and everyone seems to be in pretty good spirits. Chiwetel Ejiofor is making romance with Danny Glover's daughter! And John Cusack and his ex-wife are happily back together, which is OK because her husband was ground to death in the gears of a massive door.
2:29:15: Apparently the tectonic shifts worked out in a way that preserved the entire continent of Africa, so that's where the rescue vessels are heading to rebuild civilization. The screenwriters probably meant this to be a powerful allusion to the biological roots of humanity and not a hearty endorsement of colonialism, but it kind of fails at the former while succeeding at the latter.
2:30:34: And that's the movie, save for 8 minutes of credits for effects animators soundtracked to some of the worse music I've ever heard.
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