I’m not a big fan of doomsday nonsense (even the real stuff has a very low chance of doing us in), and so you can imagine the dim view I take of people claiming that a Mayan prophecy says we’ll all die in 2012. I have yet to see one claim about this stuff that is either a) remotely true or 2) not made-up crap.
Still, I do love disaster movies, so I’m torn about Roland Emmerich’s “2012” which comes out this summer. He did “Independence Day”, a movie I love (yes, I do: it’s fun and silly and doesn’t take itself too seriously) and “The Day After Tomorrow”. The latter was pretty bad; the science was awful, but it was also really overwrought.
So what of this new movie? See for yourself:
I love that it’s wrong right from the start: the Mayans were not the earliest civilization; Sumerians had them beat by four thousand years. Also, while the fireballs hitting was cool, small rocks won’t make it to the ground moving quickly enough to be burning like that.
And what’s causing that tsunami? A giant impact? A Richter 15 earthquake? Smug?
Anyway, hard to say if the movie will be any good or not. I really like John Cusack and Amanda Peet, and Oliver Platt slays me, so who knows? But I know this: it really won’t help people like me and others trying to calm folks down and keep them from panicking over doomsday crap. Sigh.
