2012 - The Latest Hollywood Blockbuster

Well, I guess it’s no surprise that Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster film has opened up as number one it’s first week in release. Despite getting a 38% rating on Rottentomatoes.com this is sure to rake in some cash. I mean, it has a lot of CGI ‘splosions! What else do movie audiences want?

This film looks to be just a long extended action sequence. An exercise in showing off what super cool effects Hollywood is capable of. I don’t mind action and special effects, but when that’s all there is then I start to shake my head.

Emmerich has built a career of dishing out eye candy to movie audiences. Alien invasion in Independence Day, giant monster in Godzilla, flooding cities and an ice age in The Day After Tomorrow and prehistoric battles with wooly mammoths in 10,000 BC, none of which really dazzled me as much as everyone else.

So now we get world destruction in 2012. These are epic settings for a story, I just I wish there would be more focus on the characters who are dealing with these circumstances, instead of them being just one-dimensional cutouts. Why not make them as memorable as the sequences that they’re running through are?

For all the time that is spent designing these payoff scenes, why not spend as much time creating the characters. Give them a little bit of depth. Without that it just becomes a story with a fancy, decorated stage with material that’s not worth performing.