Big bangs can’t conceal shoddy script
First, a question. Did you enjoy Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, way back in 1996?
This reviewer did – loved it, in fact. A blast of old-fashioned Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) fun with, for its time, simply amazing S/FX that left you in no doubt that the world was ending not with a whimper, but rather a VERY big bang. In addition, the film’s sheer momentum and seamless progression from set-piece to set-piece allowed you to put your mind in neutral and enjoy the ride.
Hmmm. And so we move to 2012 (2009) from the same director – in between time, Emmerich has hardly excelled, with rot such as Godzilla (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 10,000 BC (2008) not even coming close to the awe and breathtakingly enjoyable destruction that ID:4 wrought on audiences.
Guess what? He hasn’t managed it with his latest, either. Not by a long way. In a nutshell, then – if one is to believe that which is published on the internet and elsewhere, 21 December 2012 might well be the swan song for mankind, and most of the planet, to boot.
Legend (and legions of conspiracy theories, and the ancient Mayans, apparently) would appear to suggest that ‘End of Days’ will arrive in a little more than three years. What is perhaps slightly unnerving is the fact that there are apparently no predictions made by any ancient civilizations (or Nostradamus, for that matter) for any later date – scary, huh?
Well, it would have been nice if 2012 had been. Scary, that is. John Cusack plays Jackson Curtis, a struggling sci-fi author, separated from his wife Kate (Amanda Peet), with only weekend access to his young children Noah (Liam James) and Lily (Morgan Lily). They’re busy bonding with mum’s new boyfriend Gordon (Thomas McCarthy), but what no-one knows, yet, apart from charismatic scientist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the White House chief of staff (Oliver Platt), the President himself (Danny Glover) and his daughter Laura (Thandie Newton) is that huge solar flares are creating swarms of ‘neutrinos’ that are bringing the Earth’s core to critical mass. In short, and with apologies to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), who will be saved and what will be left of them?
To be fair, we get to enjoy a whole range of destruction, including mega-volcanoes, titanic tsunamis and cities going down, but, unfortunately, audiences must wade through more meaningless pap masquerading as motivation and characterization than is even their due as knowing participants in the worst of blockbuster kitsch.
The cast is clearly top-notch, but dialogue this poor (provided by Emmerich and Harald Kloser) hasn’t been heard since Irwin Allen’s The Swarm (1978), which at least had the decency to keep its running time to quite a bit less than the hefty two hours 38 minutes of 2012.
Not much left to add – watch, don’t listen might be the best approach, but that’s some stretch with the ear plugs in.
158 mins.
The biggest disaster recently was Spurs thinking that they can score like a South American team.
Forget about waiting until 2012 – the end of the world is very, very close, as the forces of evil stalk a football pitch near you. Something to do with the ‘Four hoarse men’ of the Apocalypse, which is about as loud as their support usually is.
By the way, Nijinsky or Dostoyevsky or whatever the Italian catanocio was called is and was rubbish. Love from everyone at the Emirates.
Oh my God I like, soooo loved ID:4. Oh no, wait, that wasn’t me. Independence Day (to give it its correct title) was a load of utter toss. Any attempt to do better could have, and has been, done by people with a budget not dissimilar to that of an office Christmas party. An Apple computer interfacing with *anything* else is unusual enough, but an alien spaceship? Please.
Jingoistic bullshit of a high degree, and I am guessing 2012 is as well. Oh, wait – why not call it ‘5′, as all the numbers add up to 5, and it’s easier to remember? If you watch *any* film by Emmerich, you need your brain taking out and a clockwork mouse inserting.
Discuss.
‘If you watch *any* film by Emmerich, you need your brain taking out and a clockwork mouse inserting.’
I loved ID:4. Loved The Day After Tomorrow. In fact, I secretly watched Godzilla again a while back and had a guilty laugh. I loved them for all their jingoistic bullshit and couldn’t have cared less that Apple computers wouldn’t interface with blah blah blah. I let that one go the same way I let the idea of aliens crossing the vastness of space in a hunk of metal go, too.
If that means I need my brain replacing with a clockwork mouse then so be it and I’m first in the queue. l’d rather have fun than get sniffy about a little conceit.
You have to wonder about critics who watch blockbusters as if they ought to be documentaries! Come on, Colin. You can have a laugh at the cinema too!
Hello Chris,
I do appreciate that this kind of film has a broad appeal (see the box office takings for 2012), but they ain’t for me. Nobody likes a laugh more than me – except for my girlfriend, some of her family and most small children.
However, there’s a difference between a good, escapist hour-and-a-half of mindless nonsense (which I also enjoy – Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek, the Harry Potter series – blockbusters all) and an hour or so of my life I’ll never get back. If I may employ Master Potter as a parallel, I realized some years ago that Hogwarts doesn’t exist, and that Bellatrix LeStrange is never going to sleep with me, but that hardly mars my enjoyment. A little conceit is fine and dandy.
I suppose the problem is the insubstantiality of many of Emmerich’s works. How hard would it be to work a story into his SFX-fests on occasion? All said and done, I did quite enjoy 10,000 BC (as reviewed on this very site), but it had a story (sort of), even though timelines were played fast and loose with. If I had to pick one of his movies for the Clockwork Mouse Award, this would be it.
And I stand by what I say – I would sooner see My Fair Lady (1964) three times back to back than watch Independence Day again.
Fair cop Colin, but what I objected to was not that you didn’t like Independence Day but the suggestion that anyone who did was not engaging their brain.
Of course, you were just jesting, but even so different people like different things in movies. I like genre films, which effectively means I like movies in which I already know what’s going to happen. The fun is not so much in the story it tells but in the way it tells the same old story.
The story behind Independence Day – or The Day After Tomorrow – may not be very brainy, and they’re certainly not original, but I do think they are skillfully and intellegently told.
The first Harry Potter movie has bags of character and plot but the storytelling pales in comparison to, say, the build-up to the first attack in Independence Day. To labour the point further, the first Harry Potter is a good story told without much flair whereas Independence Day is an old (and old-fashioned) story told with loads and loads of flair.
OK, my turn. Glad that my first ’slamming’ for a while has brought such illuminating discussion.
You are friends all, so I will explain my own allegiances with care. Chris, you know that I am with you completely concerning Independence Day, and disagree with Colin, for by and large exactly the reasons you cite. However, I simply cannot understand how you could ‘love’ The Day After Tomorrow, or for that matter have a guilty wa-, sorry, laugh over Godzilla.
And have you actually seen 2012 yet? You seem to be somewhat evasive on that point, which is interesting…
For me, and particularly concerning Godzilla, because it was Emmerich’s first blockbuster after Independence Day and my expectations were so high, the director has never yet lived up to the promise of his first mega-smash.
I think that all one needs to do is compare his films with the earlier work of Spielberg – from Jaws (1975) onwards, high-concept summer hits that nevertheless managed to combine heart and chutzpah with intellect, thanks to Spielberg’s excellent choice of writers, something that appears to have passed Emmerich by. (And which, incidentally, was why Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) was such a huge disappointment – it simply did not engage the mind as well as guts like the earlier Indy films all did.)
For that reason, I think your ‘It’s only a laugh’ argument falls down somewhat – nobody likes a laugh more than me, except perhaps Colin (d’you see what I did there?) but would you say then that all blockbusters are great? I don’t think so.
Oh, and Ashburton, thanks for that…
Hi James/Colin,
It is an interesting discussion! I haven’t seen 2012 yet, which is why I haven’t mentioned it, and you may well be right about that film’s particular faults.
If one were to compare Emmerich’s style, say, to that of some other action directors (McG, Michael Bay, etc) I think one would see that Emmerich’s set pieces do have a coherence that theirs lack. In a Michael Bay action scene, the images flow so rapidly that it’s hard to really tell what’s going on – its just loud and brash – but not in one choreographed by Emmerich and it’s that aspect of his movies that I like.
To be poncey, he depends less on editing than he does on mise-en-scène – the shots last longer and each one has more to say. I think that’s the hallmark of a director aspiring towards – if not achieving – the kind of filmmaking you see in Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). So, compared with Spielberg, he is pretty average, but he still towers over many other action directors.
I think I have greater tolerance for hackneyed writing than journalists may have – after all, they are wordsmiths, whereas I am not, and in a way that’s the source of many of our disagreements.
Esteemed journalists such as yourselves may well ask why a tidal wave would just hit Manhatten without any identifiable cause whereas I just say ‘Oh! A tidal wave’ and marvel at the way the sequence unravels.
Cheers, Chris – all taken on board, and by and large agreed with, save one small point.
While you are kind enough to praise my/our journalistic credentials, and thanks for that, I don’t have a problem with Apples interfacing with alien spaceships or tidal waves appearing out of nowhere, truly.
Poetic licence is very much a part of the blockbuster (as, it must be said, it is of much of cinema), but I just can’t stand lousy, lazy dialogue. Would you perhaps say, and no dig intended, that your higher tolerance threshold for the same was what allowed you to enjoy Drag Me To Hell (2009) far, far more than I did? And does the same therefore go for Emmerich’s work?
Hi James,
Absolutely – I just don’t go to action flicks for the dialogue, I’m very forgiving about that. Though, in defence, my tolerance for corny lines rapidly diminishes in the absence of other qualities to admire.
“Its Unix! I know this system!” – a God-awful line from Jurassic Park (1993). But I don’t mind, because elsewhere the filmmakers contrive splendid visual tricks such as superimposing a DNA sequence onto the skin of a velociraptor. And, of course, we get to see T-Rex eating people.
That Jaws has great dialogue is really an added bonus, which pushes it into the ‘great movie’ category – on the other hand, if Sleuth (1972) or Twelve Angry Men (1957) had corny dialogue, that would be a problem.
A question for you and Colin – bearing in mind that movies were originally silent, do you think that cinema is primarily a visual or literary medium?
Hi Chris,
An excellent question – for myself, I’d have to go with the former. When audiences first gasped (some even fainted, apocryphally) merely at the image of a train arriving at a station, shivered at the vulpine Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922) or screamed at Lon Chaney’s unmasking in The Phantom of the Opera (1927), they were responding at a visceral level to an artist’s manipulation of the key sense in question, namely sight.
Since the introduction of sound, great dialogue and quotable quotes have become an intrinsic part of the joy of cinema, but I doubt somehow that early audiences went home talking to each other about the great lines they had ‘read’ that evening – rather, they would enthuse to the mise en scene, as per your earlier point. So, despite the obvious importance of a good script nowadays, it was always visual first, I would wager.
Oh, and I quite agree with you about that line from Jurassic Park – a real cringer. And funny how it sticks out like a sore thumb in comparison with the film’s immaculately staged action and, it must be said, the more-than-solid remainder of the script, don’t you think? I believe that Spielberg unfortunately chose to make an obvious, vapid ‘Hey – nerdy kids who like computers have a role to play in society too’ point, which is a shame.
Well, Chris, I would have to hedge here and say they are (or have the potential to be) both visual and literary. The medium is one of story-telling, and benefits from both dimensions. Obviously, a film without pictures would be a radio show or a podcast, but I digress. In the early days of stick and string, the very fact that images were moving was enough to elicit gasps of wonder, and the marriage of sound to this must have been truly awesome (and I use the word advisedly).
I think a ‘film’ as we refer to it today is at best a combination of the two, complementing each other to make a thing better that the sum of its parts. And I have to disagree – a really awful piece of dialogue jars as bad – if not worse – as seeing the boom mike hove into view. That isn’t to say I won’t enjoy the film as a whole, but it can certainly tarnish the experience. Jurassic Park was a lot of fun, even so – and I completely agree about Jaws.
I take it you saw the godawful travesty that was the remake of Sleuth (2007)? If you have, I’ll bet you we’re in complete agreement.