I love watching the end of the world unfold on screen. It’s just something I enjoy. And sue me if I was a little bummed at a certain caution on the part of Hollywood to offer up the apocalyptic imagery it had serviced to the masses in the action-packed summers of the 1990s following 9/11.
Go back and take a look at “Armageddon,” for instance. Hardly great cinema but I got a kick out of it just as I did “Independence Day” or anything comparable. The shot of the Chrysler Building being sheered in half by meteorites as people plummet to their death — the imagery is obviously prickly in the post-9/11 environment. And everything from “War of the Worlds” to “The Dark Knight” has gone out of its way to comment toward the disasters of that year, to put forth the sense that a thought process is being injected into blockbuster entertainment, that the mayhem actually means something on an artistic level. And I’m all for that. But I prefer not to be held hostage by it, either.
I remember talking with a colleague in New York last month who was bemoaning the failure of Alex Proyas’s “Knowing.” I had not seen the film yet at the time (though I have sense, and it’s certainly a…lesser accomplishment, shall we say, but it also deals with interesting ideas that really should be in mainstream Hollywood cinema). I rebutted with the notion that maybe a good, spectacle, end-of-the-world trip to the movies is just what Hollywood needs to shake out all the cobwebs.
When my list of the year’s most anticipated films hit on New Year’s Day, more than a few people raised an eyebrow at the inclusion of Roland Emmerich’s “2012.” I should come clean with the admission that Emmerich’s films, more often than not, work for me on some primitive, Neanderthal level. But I have to also admit to being fascinated with all of the speculation over the year 2012, which I wrote about nearly a year ago.