I don’t know about you, but when I went to see "Speed" I wasn’t thinking it would be great art. I thought to myself; “Sure, it’s going to be stupid, but I can tune out for a bit and be entertained.” And really, that’s all the movie was supposed to be anyway. Just a bit of fluff in your life to take your mind off of the insanity. Then, somewhere in the third act, they decided to ratchet up the action a bit and do something that was, well, so incredibly stupid that it took you out of the action and made you say; “Oh come on! Really? A bus just jumped over a gap in the freeway and landed on the other side? FFS, that’s simply not possible. It might as well have sprouted wings to save itself."
Yeah, that was stupid. What it did was break a familiar law of physics and how we know things behave for a stupid stunt somebody thought would be cool that stopped us cold in our tracks and actually screwed up our thought process, thereby losing us.
Well, "2012" is a lot like that. Sadly, they didn’t even wait until act three.
In fact, not only do we see that gag done once, we see it done three times, by the same character in three different vehicles in three different parts of the movie. Really?
Now I know what you’re saying, you’re saying; “But it’s a movie about the end of the world! You have to let them do some whacky stuff.” No. Not that much. Certainly not that early with the graphics turned up to 11. It just doesn't give them anywhere to go.
You can change a single piece of reality and have the end of the world come. Fine, that’s your freekin’ movie right there. But when you add in all of the extremely lame cliff hangers, chases, collapsing buildings and narrow escapes that come up in this film, it simply makes no sense whatsoever that our main character makes it out of the first reel, let alone saves the day at the end of the film. The logic just doesn’t add up and feel right in the first ten minutes.
John August recently wrote on his blog;
"As the writer, you need to burn down houses. You need to push characters out of their safe places into the big scary world — and make sure they can never get back. Sure, their stated quest might be to get home, but your job is to make sure that wherever they end up is a new and different place.”
http://johnaugust.com/
Ok, fine, but there is over doing it and "2012" is way past that line way too early in the film.
I guess the only good thing I can say about a lot of the cliff hanger scenes; if you need to go out for popcorn or visit the restroom, feel free to do so at anytime. There's going to be another scene exactly like it in about 30 minutes. And I do mean exactly.
