The most remarkable thing about the doomsday disaster movie 2012 is not the eye-gouging special effects. Nor is it the casual depiction of the death of nearly six billion people. It’s not even the scene devoted to the cancelling of the London Olympics due to unforeseen Armageddon. No, the truly unique thing about Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is that it’s not unique at all. In fact, it positively struggles to find it’s own space in a movie marketplace that’s crammed to bursting with apocalyptic product.
After witnessing the end of civilisation in movies such as Zombieland and Terminator Salvation, we will soon face the big screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic Pulitzer prizewinner, The Road, complete with deserted highways, cannibals and heart-breaking reflections on fatherhood. This will be followed closely by Denzel Washington playing a mysterious wanderer among a tiny band of, yes, post-apocalyptic survivors in The Book of Eli, and Dennis Quaid playing an honest man in the American Midwest during the onslaught of the biblical Armageddon in Legion.
Global warming documentaries too, such as The Age of Stupid, repeatedly show us a future in which the Earth is already ruined. Even children’s films such as the recent 9 and Wall-E, are not averse to the death of humanity as we know it.
And it’s not just movies either. On television the forthcoming Day One, a high-profile American series in the Lost mould, will follow a group of American apartment dwellers who somehow survive a global cataclysm. Iconic touchstone video games such as the recently released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 play with apocalyptic imagery, such as the destruction of the White House in a burnt-out bullet-ridden Washington DC. In books, popular nonfiction prognostications such as The World Without Us, Our Final Century and The Coming Plague continue to ride into the bestseller list based on cogent scientific arguments about the end of life on Earth. In other words, when Danny Glover’s Obama-style President announces, midway through 2012, “The world as we know it will soon come to an end,” he is essentially preaching to the converted.
“There is definitely a lot in the collective consciousness right now about the end of the world,” the 2012 star Chiwetel Ejiofor says. “The fragility of the planet, the nature of global warming, the free access to nuclear weapons, financial and scientific responsibility — these are all part of our consciousness. So a movie like 2012, though entertaining and extraordinary in scope, allows us to discuss these things.”
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Admittedly, the level of discussion in 2012 is brief. In the film the Earth’s core overheats, resulting in a spectacularly cracking and melting crust and giant super-tsunamis. But, as Ejiofor suggests, it is the context that is all important — the idea that the movie is not being released on to an unsuspecting public, but to a world already suffering from apocalyptic jitters.
“We are already pointed towards 2012,” explains the writer and apocalyptic expert Lawrence E. Joseph, the author of Apocalypse 2012: An Optimist Investigates the End of Civilisation and the forthcoming The Aftermath: A Guide to Preparing For and Surviving Apocalypse 2012. “I have seen the movie 2012 and, for the record, tsunamis are not going to sweep through the planet, and the Earth’s crust is not going to melt. But it does at least raise the questions, ‘What might happen?’ and ‘What are the near-term catastrophes that we can prevent?’ ”
For Joseph, the catastrophe that we all face in 2012 (or early 2013) is a giant solar blast that will fry electrical grids around the planet and plunge us into a world without electricity for up to three years. This, he warns, is not fanciful conjecture and is in fact all thoroughly documented by America’s National Academy of Sciences, which in December 2008 released a 152-page report highlighting the grave vulnerability of power grids in America and elsewhere to solar blasts — the largest modern example of which is due to strike near the end of 2012. “No electricity doesn’t just mean no telecoms,” he warns. “It means no water, no fuel, no refrigeration, no basic law enforcement or functioning military. So, will it be like being knocked back into the pre-electrical age? No. It will be much worse. Those people at least knew how to live without electricity. We certainly don’t!”
He adds too that other scientifically validated threats to our stability include a giant Nasa-observed tear in the Earth’s magnetic field (which usually protects us from solar blasts), and the possibility of an oceanic asteroid strike that would result in catastrophic floods around the globe.
Poppycock, says the former Cambridge scholar Ole Peter Grell, the co-author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a book that examines the rise of apocalyptic obsessions in Reformation-era Europe. Grell claims that interest in Armageddon flourishes whenever the matrices that hold societies together begin to shift. “Apocalyptic obsessions are generally found in times of great break-ups,” Grell says. “At the moment you’ve got all sorts of reactions to global warming and the current financial breakdown. But when you look back, from medieval times through to the Reformation, when the general way of the world is no longer a given, the idea of the apocalypse becomes a tool to interpret a dramatically shifting world.”
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And certainly, a quick skim through movie history validates Grell’s thesis. For the previous high-water mark of doomsday movies was the 1950s, when films such as When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds and On the Beach articulated the fears of a society gripped by an escalating Cold War. Similarly, late-1960s/early-1970s doomsday movies such as Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man reflect obvious social issues — the former, especially, is a blatant race relations analogy in which the white man gets a taste of his own medicine.
And yet, if we take this analysis to its logical conclusion, there is something worryingly different about the current crop of apocalyptic blockbusters. In recent years movies such as Terminator 2, Deep Impact and Independence Day were all about the possibility of staving off the end of days, whereas today’s movies take the death of humanity for granted. Even 2012, the most buoyant movie in the pack, suggests that fewer than 400,000 people will survive the global cataclysm. In Terminator Salvation nuclear meltdown is simply a fated fact. Life on Earth will end, and soon.
Joseph says that on the surface there seem to be numerous explanations for this new downbeat outlook, including the effects of globalisation, of environmental damage and the financial crisis. The latter, he says, has significantly scarred the American psyche. “There was a failure with the financial crisis that was deeply unsettling for people. The fact that nobody — not Harvard, not CNN, not the Government — could see this coming really scared people and left them feeling exposed.”
But more than that, he argues that modern apocalyptic obsessions in Western culture are based on a profound, and often unspoken, personal guilt that each of us carries “It seems that we have this sneaking guilt that we cannot sustain this life we lead,” he says. “We’ve had it so good for so many years and in so many ways. We don’t want to lose all we have, but at the same time we don’t know if we merit keeping it.”
In other words, these apocalyptic movies, books and cultural artefacts represent a profound snapshot of who we are, right now, and a stinging critique of our fears and our flaws. But they are also, the film-maker John Hillcoat cautions, bloody annoying. Hillcoat, who directed The Road, has meticulously avoided the busy CGI-laden G?tterd?mmerung of traditional doomsday movies precisely because it is distracting, unemotional and impossible to fathom.
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Instead his film, taking its cue from McCarthy’s source novel, never reveals the event that caused the global meltdown, and instead concentrates solely on the touching, binding relationship between a dying father (Viggo Mortensen) and his precious inquisitive son (Kodi Smit-Mcphee). “I have a problem with the whole apocalyptic genre,” Hillcoat says. “It is so much about the ‘big event’ that there’s rarely any real connection, emotionally, to the people in it. When you concentrate on the event, your personal response to the people is greatly diminished.”
And this is the point. Perhaps the Achilles’ heel of all apocalypse obsessions is that they force us outwards intellectually and emotionally, away from ourselves and human intimacy, and into the arms of abstract ideas and fears. And indeed there isn’t a single moment of emotional honesty in 2012 to counterbalance the movie’s 158 minutes of visually decorative wham-bam. Joseph argues, convincingly, that we should kit ourselves out with enough solar panels and wind-turbines to survive completely off the grid come the big solar flare of 2012. But in the meantime, clearly, we should do nothing less than ignore the frenzy, enjoy the Olympics, and take our movies, like our popcorn, with a pinch of salt.