2012 and the Giant Tsunami.

I watched the movie 2012 a few nights ago and greatly enjoyed it. But I thought about it the following day and realised that I’d been entirely swept along by the special effects. Certain doubts and questions had tugged at my sleeve along the way, but I’d pushed them aside because a 1,000ft tsunami was about to swamp several things that everybody had always thought unswampable (such as a Buddhist monastery that was probably 5-10,000ft above sea level, but I’m coming to that.)

  

So let’s have a list of the minus points:

1. Several bits of irritating and quite unnecessary mawkishness had me wondering whether Spielberg had been behind the scenes whispering instructions into the director’s ear.

2. There were a few too many of those extreme, groan-inducing coincidences which I assume writers think you won’t notice. (Like the fact that the big plane which has just flown all the way from America to China happens to crash land close to a road along which a particularly significant group of people just happens to be driving. Sixty seconds later and the future course of world history would have been substantially altered. Or, to put it another way, there would have been no movie.)

3. Some of the plot points are, predictably I suppose, more than a little implausible (like the 1,000ft tsunami which swamps a Buddhist monastery which is probably 5-10,000ft above sea level.)

4. In choosing which characters should live and which should die, I suspect the writer was cribbing directly from the chapter in The Film Maker’s Guide entitled ‘Which Type of Character Must Make It and Which Mustn’t.’ If you’ll excuse one spoiler, I’d quite like to reveal that the little dog makes it, but his reluctantly bimboish, gold-digging, gangster’s moll of a human doesn’t. (She did choose a Russian gangster after all, so what could she expect? In fact, neither of the Russian characters survive, which is probably rule #1 in the American version of the Guide.)

5. I gather that the science behind the whole story was even less plausible than a 1,000ft tsunami overreaching itself, but I’m no scientist so I’ll reserve judgement on that one.

But as I said, the special effects are most impressive. A 1,000ft tsunami is still a 1,000ft tsunami when all’s said and done. And I did like one particular fragment of script. When the giant solar flare has finally stopped rearranging planet Earth and everything on it, killing 99.99% of its inhabitants in the process, the politician (who we don’t really like) looks incredulous as he asks the quieter, more self-effacing of the two scientists (both of whom we do really like):

‘Are you telling me that the North Pole is now in Wisconsin?’ to which the scientist replies, in a suitably quiet and self-effacing manner: ‘The South Pole, actually.’

It’s probably complete tosh scientifically, but it did make me smile.