2012

Seen at: Cinema Saver 6, two weeks ago.

Finally I got around to seeing this. I kept putting off and putting it off. It wasn't that I was dreading seeing a movie about the total destruction of the Earth (the second one of 2009, after Knowing), but that everytime I thought about the run time (2:35), I would suddenly find another shorter movie more appealing that day.

Anything over two hours five minutes has come to seem long to me. Fortunately I've developed a new strategy, part of my new initiatives for the new year of 2010.

This new strategy emerged after a recent realization that watching so many trailers has really begin wearing me down. In some chains, like the Carmike, there are almost twenty minutes of trailers before the show starts.

It occurred to me that maybe one of the reasons I was having trouble keeping interest and attention during movies was because so much of my emotional energy was being sapped before the movie even started---by the trailers.

Drama, Aristotle teaches us, is about emotional release. This is why we go to see the spectacle. We achieve catharsis by doing so.

But maybe my catharsis quotient was feeling filled by all the little overwrought mini-stories before the feature, ones that I was seeing over and over, with booming sound that overwhelms you even more than the soundtrack of the feature itself?

So I decided to stop watching trailers as much as possible. It's not an obsession, just a rule of thumb. I avoid them when I can. I still arrive at the showtime to see a movie, but often now I hang around in the corridor inside the door to the auditorium, pretending to check a text message and letting people walk around me.

I don't mind hearing the trailers, but I wait until they are done playing, and then slip into the auditorium right as the distributor card is coming up for the feature. Sometimes I wind up having to sit down front because of this.

More recently I've developed the art of keeping my eyes closed all through the trailers, opening them only when the feature comes on.

In any case, it seems to have worked. I've noticed I have a lot more emotional stamina, and my "clock watching" during movies (actually looking at my cellphone of course) has drastically fallen off.

In the case of 2012, this strategy really worked. I found myself in the third row of the two-buck cinema to see this. But the length and the subject matter, with all its special effects, was not really that tiring.

This is despite the fact that the movie is really hokey and I didn't care about the characters very much. In fact, the whole thing in the end looked like a eugenics fantasy of the elite---if only we could wipe out most of the world, what a lovely place this planet could be. The last scene of the film, in which the survivors find their paradise is sickly nauseating in this regard.

Yes, the Earth is basically destroyed, but the enlightened elite, and the few minions who were allowed at the last minute to board the rescue arcs (no doubt to act as servants to the elite in the post-apocalypse) will thrive and prosper. Happy ending!

There are seem really groaners, as far as science lines, one that make an old physicist really laugh. My favorite: "the neutrinos are having a physical effect!" Instead of a spiritual one, eh?

In other words, this is a stupid disaster movie with a rotten message but with decent special effects. I can't imagine any reason to see this on DVD. The pleasure to be had was in sitting in the third row and being overwhelmed by the spectacle.

Enjoy it while you can. The world may end tomorrow, as it has in so many movies this pas year.

Best Apocalypse: 2012