As far as the new disaster film "2012" is concerned, the world will end with both a bang and a whimper, the bang of undeniably impressive special effects and the whimper of inept writing and characterization. You pays your money, you takes your chances.
In fact, it's hard to say what leaves the more lasting impression, how realistically director Roland Emmerich has destroyed Los Angeles (it's the third try, after "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," practice apparently making perfect) or how difficult a time the actors have bringing any life to the script by Emmerich and Harald Kloser.
Nothing, not even a season of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, will give you more respect for how difficult it is to be an actor than watching top talent like John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet and Oliver Platt struggling to treat the film's ungodly language and situations with perfect seriousness.
The deeper truth, of course, is that it doesn't really matter and everyone with a hand in "2012" knows as much. Audiences with a hankering for the apocalypse shrug off the ridiculous and sit tight for the special effects. In this case, they are worth the wait.
Overseen by visual effects supervisors Volker Engle and Marc Weigert, "2012's" pyrotechnics are the best money, a lot of money, can buy. Just to give you a taste of how elaborate it all got, more than 1,000 people at 15 effects companies worked on this, using 500,000 tons of steel to construct platforms that realistically shook and building a blue screen that was more than 600 feet long and 40 feet high.
Though this equal-opportunity endeavor ends up destroying a hefty chunk of the world -- St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, the Christ the Redeemer in Rio and the Washington Monument in D.C. -- it is its first shot at Armageddon, the leveling of Los Angeles, that makes the biggest impression. It is absolutely terrifying earthquakes, 10.5s according to the press notes, that do Our Town in, in a big way. Streets buckle, freeways collapse, houses and office towers disintegrate before our eyes, houses on the coast slide into the Pacific. This city has been taken down before, but never like this.
While a putative Maya prophecy that the world would end on Dec. 21, 2012 plays a major part in "2012's" publicity, the film itself is too busy destroying things to pay that forecast much mind.
