Disaster movie offers audience front row seat to the end of Earth

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Bryce Bradford

R.E.M.’s popular 1998 song, “It’s the End of the World,” sums up the premise behind the number one movie this week pretty well.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it.”
Much like Y2K, there has been a lot of buzz about the ancient Mayan civilization’s prediction of Earth’s demise in 2012. So much so, Roland Emmerich, director of apocalyptic films “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” decided to release a film to further scare people out of their minds about the theory.
In “2012,” it is discovered that a massive solar flare has caused the temperature of the Earth’s core to rapidly increase, and desperate measures are taken as rapid changes in the Earth’s climate become unavoidable.
John Cusack plays the lead role as Jackson Curtis, a writer in Los Angeles dealing with family issues. Chiwetel Ejiofor (“Four Brothers”) plays geologist Adrian Helmsley, who helps discover the disaster to come. With a cast of other familiar and well-established actors, the film receives more leverage, allowing the audience to care about the characters’ well-being rather than just the special effects.
Similar to the character dynamics of the film “Crash,” there are many different characters that may seemingly have no relation or connection in the beginning, but lives intersect and eventually everyone has a common goal of survival in the end.
The film’s special effects take center stage as earthquakes, volcanoes and sky-high tsunami waves take the audience to the ends of the Earth.
By sitting up close in the theater, you can even scare yourself because the effects make you feel like you are really there when disaster strikes.
My biggest problem was that some of the sequences were a bit far-fetched (Cusack driving a limo through a crashing building) and many of the disasters his character escapes from would be improbable or impossible to get out of.
But at the end of the day, the main character has to survive and he wouldn’t be a good lead if he wasn’t thrust into most of the film’s danger.
Ejiofor gives a good performance as a moral compass in the film. As the government’s go-to man for the impending disasters, he is challenged to not only fight for the physical survival of the human race, but also the moral standards that make us humans.
The film’s run time is a whopping two and a half hours. While this would be disastrous for most impatient people, I found it to be very engaging. It wouldn’t have hurt them to cut down on some things and not drag the movie out for so long, but I personally didn’t mind. As long as a movie can keep me entertained the entire time, I could care less how long it is.
Anyone loving good action sequences should really enjoy this film. So grab a front row seat to the end of the world.
Bryce Bradford is an agricultural communications senior.