Disaster Movie Montage – 2012

I watched 2012 over the holiday weekend and I must say it was a rather exhausting ordeal. I’m not sure how long the movie actually was but it felt as though I had personally experienced the end of the world. This was truly the disaster movie to end all disaster movies, or perhaps the disaster movie that copied all disaster movies?

I found myself tracking the various references to previous disaster blockbusters as well as specific examples of generic disaster movie clichés. My unofficial survey found references or allusions to the following films:

• The Day After Tomorrow – scientists predicting disaster, gotta love em.
• The Poseidon Adventure – boat tipping is fun!
• Deep Impact – flying lava instead of asteroids but the effects looked similar.
• Dante’s Peak / Volcano – nothing beats lava.
• Earthquake – done up much bigger of course.
• Titanic – without the love.
• The Bible – well, the bible is chocked full of disasters and a certain bible story is plagiarized here.


Hey, somebody left the tub running !

I also tracked the following disaster movie clichés:

• The impossible dog rescue.
• The annoying kids that get saved anyway.
• The poor bastard that discovers the danger but doesn’t make it.
• The last second, implausible escape by our hero – done about 7 times.
• The Redemption of Mankind.
• Lot’s of special effects which may or may not advance the plot.
• Lot’s of bad acting that definitely doesn’t do much to advance the plot.
• Comic relief that is thankfully killed off.

I’m sure there were more movie references and clichés that I missed, but you get the picture. The movie was not a non-stop rollercoaster ride like the Transformer series, but in this case the back story became nearly as exhausting as the special effects. The characters never really came into their own and overall most of the films performances were thoroughly forgettable. The only exception to this though was Woody Harrelson’s manic anti-government conspiracy blogger, but this portrayal was so over the top that it threatened to overwhelmed the planet’s largest volcanic eruption. I like Woody but this was more than a little hard to watch. John Cusack is a great actor but in 2012 he phoned his performance in – you’d think someone experiencing the end times would at least break a sweat but he seemed a little too cool throughout the movie to be believable.

It was the end of the world as I knew it, but after watching 2012 I wouldn’t recommend experiencing it again…

Copyright 2009, Raving Reviews™