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2012

John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson

A recent study has found that 17 percent of the population believes they will escape death with the apocalypse. No dirt nap. No death rattle. No family and friends gathered around lying through their teeth about what a great fellow or gal you were. Just angel wings, harps, and cotton candy clouds, time. Why does this statistic make me want to potty myself? Mental illness, people who just do not understand the question, and people who have their basement filled with firearms, gasoline, and grain make up part of that number, but that still leaves a lot of “normal” Americans who believe God is going to stop the record on the musical chairs game called existence in their lifetime. With a margin of error of up to 3 percent, this could mean that one out of five of us believe we are going to live out one of those bad Kirk Cameron Left Behind movies. You know, the ones where the pilot disappears from the cockpit of the plane. Cars go driverless. A guy is about to put a dollar in a stripper’s g-string and she vanishes. (Come on, you know there have to be a few shaker girls who love Jesus.) The Democrats, are busy passing all kinds of reforms in health care, education, and helping the poor, because most of God’s warriors, the Republican Party, are gone, except for the Log Cabin Republicans because there are no piccolo players in the Big Guy’s brass band. David Sedaris suddenly becomes a household name. A fully funded NPR becomes the most popular spot on the dial. All talk of a “Walker: Texas Ranger” reunion special disappears. Surprisingly, Anne Coulter would still be walking around, because even God does not want to put up with that bat crap crazy future cat lady any sooner than he has to. A lot of good real estate becomes available and lines at Disneyland are shorter. On the positive, at least people in Iowa City finally get to find out if Hayden Fry is really God or not.

The number of people who believe we live in apocalyptic times seems huge, and always leaves me with questions like, okay, why do the end of the world types always sell everything they own? Hum, what are you going to do with the money? It is not like you can use it in heaven. Since our caveman days, a good percentage of humanity has believed that they are living in the end times. The only thing they all held in common? THEY WERE WRONG. Before you start going over the Bible in a Hal Lindsey-like fashion with a calculator, or turn to your buddy and tell him Obama is the third anti-Christ as Nostradamus predicted, do a little research. I know that reason and thinking is sometimes the enemy of faith, but God gave you a brain. Much like that smoothie you just had to get at 2 a.m. in the morning, you might not be using it, but you got a brain all the same. If you do any amount of research at all, you will find thousands of examples where people have predicted the end of the world, some of the forecasts were by spiritual leaders of thousands!

The first case of people believing the end was upon us is from an Assyrian clay tablet from around 2800 BC, which warns, “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days.” The earth and humanity kept on trucking. Entire societies have become gripped with this fear, including the Romans 634 years before Jesus was born. It is a slow year if at least one or two prophets and would-be messiahs did not pop up to claim all the signs are in place. Even people who should have known better, like Martin Luther (no later than 1600), Charles Wesley (1836), and John Smith (1890), predicted dates. My favorite is when people have gotten it wrong and will not admit it. Usually, when a person gets egg on their face by guessing the date of the end of the world wrong, they crunch the numbers and come back with a new date, and then another new date, until they themselves assume room temperature. In 1914, one religious group got all hyped up for the end and it did not happen… wait, it did, we just do not know it. On that date, Jesus came back and is now ruling invisibly. Another group missed the target date in 1844 and came back and claimed that they were right all along but that they were talking about events in heaven, not earth.

In our own lifetimes, most people remember the Hale-Bopp Comet, Heaven’s Gate suicides, the Y2K scare, and the sad events at Waco. But, a good scare is hard to keep down. The new date for the end of the world is 2012, at least according to some people’s understanding of the Mayan calendar, the Bible, Nostradamus, studying the stars, looking at their belly button lint, and spinning cats around by their tails. Writers Patrick Geryl, Michael Drosnin and Kev Peacock are three of the most powerful voices in this new forecast. People have predicted magnetic pole reversals, comets hitting the earth, the Sun’s magnetic field reversing, a mystery planet called “X” disturbing our orbit, and “Hyperspatial Breakthrough, Planetesimal Impact, Alien Contact, Historical Metamorphosis, Metamorphosis of Natural Law, Solar Explosion, Quasar Ignition at the Galactic Core."

The pull of 2012 is so strong that crap master Roland Emmerich has made a disaster all his own. There are certain names, when attached to a film, predict what you are going to get – McQ, Bret Ratner, Michael Bay, and that French dude that directed Catwoman. With Roland Emmerich, you know what is in store for you, millions of dollars of special effects, and not one cent of common sense. Emmerich’s movies cost a small fortune to bring to the big screen, so money has to be saved somewhere. Usually the stars are either up and coming, or on their last legs. You can save a few thousand by having a script penned on the back of a cocktail napkin, too! Independence Day and Stargate were bearable, but those films were fifteen years ago. Since then we have gotten The Patriot, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. In all honesty, some of the special effects and CGI in this film are amazing. It is Emmerich’s best film in the last decade-and-a-half, but that is not saying much.

John Cusack, the most underrated actor in Hollywood, stars as Jackson Curtis, a sci-fi writer and limousine driver, the “every man” the audience is supposed to identify with, who finds that he is living in the midst of a global disaster. Amanda Peet is onboard as his ex-wife, because a nasty divorce can be smoothed over with a few meteor showers and tidal waves. Plus, the audience needs to root for the two lovebirds to get back together, because nothing says love is in the air like piles of dead bodies everywhere. But do not worry, the governments of the world have a plan and are prepared.

I did not hate this movie as much as I thought I would. It is a modern Irwin Allen type of movie. End of the world films are a dime a dozen, but what is unforgivable is the marketing campaign. At the end of every trailer for this movie, audiences are told to “Find Out The Truth. Google search 2012.” If a person types into a search engine “2012,” not only are you going to get all the movie tie-ins, but also all of “the end of the world” crazy talk. People who are not skeptical might look at some of these pages and start to buy the bunk being made up on those pages. As the UK The Guardian noted about this marketing campaign, it is “deeply flawed.” It is distasteful to make a buck on made up real life fears, and crazy talk. 2012 will come and go, just as a lot of the dates predicted have flown by. Every generation looks at the corruption around them, believes things cannot get worse, and that the end is near, and it does not happen. But I could be wrong.

Verdict: Millions of dollars on special effects, and not one cent of common sense.