A failed writer (John Cusack) tries to lead his family to safety as the world literally falls apart around them amid a series of global cataclysms. ... read review »

review

2012

rating: 3 stars

If director Roland Emmerich had written "Aquarius," the lyrics would've gone something like this: "When the moon is in the Seventh House/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then you can forget peace among the planets - it's time to die, a million different ways!"

Emmerich's singularly destructive interests as a filmmaker, as seen in "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," are nothing compared to the Vegas buffet of apocalyptic scenarios littering "2012," soon to flood the multiplexes with the cinematic equivalent of nacho pump-cheese until we're stuck there, in line at the concession counter, gasping out our last bits of unnecessary exposition. I quite enjoyed the experience, at least the first five or six hours of it. "2012" is not simply the last disaster movie you ever need to see. It's the last movie you ever need to see.

Objectively considered, it is pretty dire, both in its narrative speculations (owing to the Mayan calendar foretelling a dicey near-future for us all) and in its merry defiance of every reasonable standard of storytelling quality. But film, like film criticism, concerns more than mere objective truths. "2012," which samples everything from "Earthquake" to "The Perfect Storm" to "The Towering Inferno" to the Bible, will appeal to the baser instincts in anyone who lapped up Emmerich's schlocktastic "10,000 B.C." Which makes one of us, at least.

So, the people we're supposed to care about: John Cusack plays a struggling writer and part-time limo driver whose ex-wife (Amanda Peet) is dating a plastic surgeon (Tom McCarthy) who has a pilot's license. This comes in handy indeed, once these uneasily blended family units get together and skedaddle out of L.A. just as L.A. is doing its big deathbed scene.

Meantime, the president (Danny Glover) and his daughter (Thandie Newton) and the president's oily adviser (Oliver Platt, who comes pre-oiled) are being briefed by the only man on the planet who knows what's going on with the sun and the neutrinos and the Earth's core and the heating and flooding problems and the shaking and the waves and the drowning everywhere. The scientist is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who periodically throws the movie out of whack simply because he's such a good actor.

Behind the wheel of his limo, Cusack's character outruns an earthquake clear across Hollywood, which makes for a pretty good sight gag. (The special effects are on the B-minus/B-plus level of impressive, which makes them more fun, somehow.) The surgeon, in a small plane carrying the sympathetic ones who will never die, outruns a quake of his own at the Vegas airport. Up in Yellowstone National Park, Woody Harrelson plays a tetched radio host who knows what's coming and who has no interest in outrunning anything. In an Emmerich film this makes him both more and less than human.

No one cares more about our planet than Emmerich, who wrote the "2012" script with Harald Kloser. He cares because he has so many ways to get rid of it, to level its landmarks, ix-nay its inhabitants and erase entire continents, even. As a moralist he is true-blue: He'll slaughter digitized extras by the thousands, as the Earth's core heats up and the floodwaters rise and the earthquake fissures fish, but he'll devote several minutes of screen time to a dislikable little dog's fate in the face of the biggest tsunami ever, just as it's about to cream Mount Everest. The script is so brazen about its cliche-deployment, you half-expect O.J. Simpson's firefighter from "The Towering Inferno" to show up and save a kitten.

Then again, by this point in what the old folks call the "story," the canine rescue is no big whoop; we've already seen it all, twice. "2012" goes on so much longer than it should. Even its third-act endlessness becomes sort of entrancing. You can keep your Michael Bay, with his Transformers. For visual noise by the ton, Emmerich is my kind of hack, the pluperfect blend of leaden self-seriousness and accidental-on-purpose self-satirist.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense disaster sequences and some language).

Running time: 2:38.

Cast: John Cusack (Jackson Curtis); Chiwetel Ejiofor (Adrian Helmsley); Amanda Peet (Kate Curtis); Oliver Platt (Carl Anheuser); Thandie Newton (Laura Wilson); Tom McCarthy (Gordon Silberman); George Segal (Tony Delgatto); Danny Glover (President Wilson); Woody Harrelson (Charlie Frost).

Credits: Directed by Roland Emmerich; written by Harald Kloser and Emmerich; produced by Kloser, Mark Gordon and Larry Franco. A Columbia Pictures release.

review

9

rating: 2-1/2 stars

The new animated feature "9" delivers audiences into a blasted, desolate landscape reminiscent of Warsaw or Dresden after World War II. We're thrown headlong into a post-apocalyptic universe. Humanity is no more. Life, or something like it, has come down to the vicious combat between two species: machines resembling metallic dinosaurs, voracious and relentless, and a tiny band of brothers and sisters akin to burlap-sack hand puppets, with big goggle eyes and an instinct for survival.

So it's not "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs." Director Shane Acker's fantasy comes from his superb 2004 short subject (easily YouTube-able). The feature-length expansion of "9" does not feel artistically compromised or in any way interested in pandering to a young audience. The PG-13 rating is appropriate. Acker's influences are a stimulating lot, including Tim Burton (Burton is one of four producers on the project), and more to the non-human point, the melancholy riches of the stop-motion oddities created by Jan Svankmajer and especially the Brothers Quay, whose "Street of Crocodiles" remains a pinnacle of contemporary cinema, in any genre.

Something has gone slightly awry, however, en route from the 11-minute film to the 79-minute edition of "9."

In the original, wordless short (the feature has dialogue, though less than usual for an animated feature), as we came to know what's left of the planet through 9's mechanical but soulful eyes, the dread and wonder remained in perfect equipoise. The world Acker created was bleak, but the sense of visual discovery was - is - awe-inspiring.

Acker and his screenwriter, Pamela Pettler (who worked on "Corpse Bride" and the underrated "Monster House"), begin well with 9, voiced by Elijah Wood, surveying an awful landscape of rubble and despair. Later we're informed of the story behind the invention of these things of shreds, patches and tool parts. At first, though, we simply follow 9 as he fights for his life amid the trash and dust and tries to get his bearings. Escaping one near-miss with a beast, he realizes he is not alone. There are others like him, and 9 becomes the story's savior figure.

The remaining members of the tribe, described in the film's background material as "stitchpunk" creations, include a paranoid elder (voiced by Christopher Plummer), whose tactics may be doing the group more harm than good; a sweet-natured engineer (voiced by John C. Reilly); and 7, the female Xena-type burlap warrior. The metallic adversaries suck the lives out of these little people by electrocuting them, after a fashion. This, like much of "9," has a parallel in Acker's short, though bearing down - hard - on five or six such electrocution sequences in the feature feels like piling on and flattening out. This points to the film's chief drawback. It is undermined by a misjudged degree of grinding peril, and dominated by a string of deadly encounters between metal beast and humanoid creation. Before long, the dread overtakes any sense of tonal variety.

Every year the envelope of contemporary animation is pushed, stretched and tested by all sorts of adventurous talents. Acker is one of them, and many will greet "9" as the best and bravest of its genre in a long time. I'm not there with it myself, especially not in a year in which both "Coraline" and "Up" asserted their own stimulating sets of risks and rewards. Nor am I convinced that adding dialogue to this basic story was the right idea. Still, the film cannot be dismissed. I admire Acker's craftsmanship to the same degree I'm frustrated by what's missing or overstressed here, amid all the rough-textured details and the grim machine-ruled aesthetic.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for violence and scary images).

Running time: 1:19.

Featuring the voices of Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly and Crispin Glover.

Directed by Shane Acker; written by Pamela Pettler, based on the short film by Acker; produced by Jim Lemley, Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambetov and Dana Ginsburg. A Focus Features release.