On Sunday evening, completely against my better judgment, I went to the bargain cinema at Sunrise Mall, and saw "2012". I didn't want to see it, because a previous visit to see "The Day After Tomorrow" turned into such a fiasco: I got furious about the Bad Science and started acting belligerently towards the chatterboxes in front of me, and ended up basically embarrassing everyone in my party. "2012" had the same director, and generally-similar premise, so there was cause to worry.
Nevertheless, "2012" was a better experience. Partly it was because the theater was emptier, and there were no chatterboxes to worry about. In addition, the Bad Science was mercifully brief: (Please! Neutrinos don't 'Mutate' - what crap! And deep-water tsunamis should be very small, not some kind of titanic, Hawaii 5-0-type wave on steroids.)
The Destruction of California is an application of special-effects animation technology at its very finest. No one ever worried about pancaking expressway (outside a few engineers) until Oakland's 880 collapse in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake's showed just how bad an event like that could be. Now, that's all anyone worries about. "2012" featured endless visions of pancaking expressways, wonderfully and lovingly rendered in the finest detail. Marvellous! And California sliding into the sea? What joy!
What made "2012" work better than "The Day After Tomorrow" was a much better script. Basically, the screenplay was a total rip-off of Philip Wylie's and Edwin Balmer's classic 1933 science fiction novel, "When Worlds Collide" (with its wonderful 1934 sequel "After Worlds Collide") - some of the best Sci Fi ever written! It's hard to go wrong when you are plagiarizing the very best out there!
With recent advances in special-effects technology, I'd love someone to remake "When Worlds Collide". The movie was made once, a fairly-forgettable 1951 version, but Roland Emmerich, et al., have poisoned that well for awhile: people would just say it was a bad remake of "2012". Still, here's hoping!
[UPDATE: They ARE going to remake "When Worlds Collide"! Oh joy! Hope it does great box-office, with that "2012" out there stealing the thunder!]
Here is the trailer for the 1951 "When Worlds Collide":
No comments:
Post a Comment