The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
2012 - Sweeping away Mankind and the Box Office
| 24 November 2009 | By Andrej Klemencic
The world, according to a Mayan prophecy is going to come to an end on December the 21st 2012. Gigantic posters for the film read: ‘You were warned’. Even before it opened, 2012 caused a scandal in the USA, as school children who saw the trailer wrote letters to their parents and teachers, saying they were too young to die.
And although science predicts a relatively peaceful 2012, the box office disagrees. The master of disaster, German director Roland Emmerich, who brought us ‘Independence Day’, and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, in his latest epic, delivers a film that foresees the malign alignment of the planets and the Earth becoming a much less hospitable place.
Expect gigantic tsunamis sweeping over Himalayas, washing away Buddhist Lamas.
Expect the loss of familiar landmarks. St. Peter’s dome crumbling onto believers, large parts of California cracking into pieces and sinking into the Pacific and the U.S.S. Kennedy smashing the White House.
Imaginative? There is more. The Queen of England is chosen to be one of the few survivors, taking her two 30 year old corgis into the Brave New World.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the ultimate human landmark, by turn consoles and motivates Californians in a live screening. Lines from a book which sold just 640 copies save thousands from a flood of Biblical proportions.
More? We follow a hippie (Woody Harrleson) in the Yellowstone National Park, who oddly has chosen to dress as a boy scout and has an obsession with pickles.
Although all of this fanciful stuff seems like a recommendation to stay away from this mega disaster spectacle, don’t. 2012 is a masterfully directed piece of film-making, which despite scenes where the cheap romanticism reaches pudding-sweet levels, the 158 minute long film never loses its rhythm and never ceases to amaze with special effects.
The actors are close to irrelevant. John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover, Woody Harrleson, Oliver Platt and Thandie Newton are more of an unobtrusive presence serving as a backdrop to the true leads of this film – waves, eruptions and earthquakes.
‘Knowing’, also released in 2009, was the only disaster movie in recent times that offered no hope for humankind to survive, frying the planet with a blast from the Sun, but the odds are not much better in 2012, as the governments and the rich form an alliance of silence, planning to save only themselves.
Director Emmerich gives a chance to two new film names: Chiwetel Eijofor playing and American scientist and Croatian actor Zlatko Buric as the very Russian billionaire Yuri Karpov.
There are good jokes at the expense of the Russians to ease the atmosphere, some hugely expensive ‘Captain Future’ gadgets, one kiss and, of course, many innocent victims seem¬ingly recruited to die in an effort to engage the ‘video games generation’ with the big screen.
Although this film does look like a gigantic video game, the sentiment on which it is based is chilling: “The world will end and there is nothing you can do about it” is about as daunting a prospect as any.
If to that we add a masterful advertising campaign (check the official website www.whowillsurvive2012.com) we have an excellent psychological trap, waiting for millions of victims to flood the cinemas in the hope of salvation.
