2012 Apocalypse, oh yeah!

Apocalypse, oh yeah!

When the Earth becomes a microwaveable roti, run to your nearest airport and learn to love your family

• Published: 13/11/2009 at 12:00 AM
• Newspaper section: Realtime

2012

The movie presents the faceless catastrophe as a form of wonderful, gung-ho excitement.

Starring John Cusack, Chjwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover. Directed by Roland Emmerich.

In case Armageddon is imminent, we've seen enough American disaster pictures to learn a few truisms, or rather cliches:

1. Don't trust the US government, especially if the president is white, or hell, even when he's black, a sentimental Democrat and played by Danny Glover.

2. Trust instead the loony, raving, wild-haired neo-hippies living in serene isolation and preaching the Biblically, Tripitakally, or Koranically prophesised messages that will, of course, come true. And especially when the hippie is played by Woody Harrelson. Sometimes, like in 2012, the hippie even has The Map. Oh yeah.

3. If you're divorced, or have children you haven't seen in a long time, or enduring any kind of family or relationship problem, this is the best moment to fix it, preferably in the most overemotional fashion, right when the Earth becomes a microwaveable roti and the Yellowstone National Park becomes a huge acne gushing fiery pus and when there are like 3.7 billion people dying around you. Or, if you're single, this is the perfect moment to seduce the opposite sex of your species.

4. You should learn to hold your breath underwater for at least five minutes, or better yet, 25, like John Cusack's character does so heroically in 2012. The skill will come into handy. Not only you should be able to perform such Olympian feat, your eight-year-old son should be trained to do exactly the same.

5. If there are survivors, 99 percent of them will be American. The only Asians worthy of being saved are one or two Japanese and probably a few Tibetans. I'm not even sure about the Chinese. The Indians are not in the list either. Thai people? The best bet is that we'll be washed down the toilet bowl of monstrous catastrophe, along with the Cambodians.

6. Movies that claim, for marketing purposes, to be about humanity are often the most inhuman of all.

In case you haven't guessed from the trailer, the plot and some images first: A phenomenally potent solar eruption somehow boils the liquid and lava in the Earth's core, turning our planet into a microwave oven. A scientist in India detects this sign of impending cataclysm and tips off a US geologist, who then informs his superior, who then informs the president. This is in 2009.

The governments of the G8 countries cynically gang up to ensure that the rich will make it through the Mother of all Mess in 2012 by secretly building a kind of vessel deep in the Tibetan Himalaya (with Chinese labour, like they build everything else.) Meanwhile, since - as Stalin infamously said - a thousand deaths is a statistic, yet one dead is a tragedy, the film gives us a couple of individual stories. John Cusack bolted onto a plane with his divorced wife, their two kids and her new boyfriend, as LA crumbles below them. A Russian billionaire buys his way to safety with his terrible twin kids. Two jazz musicians on a cruise ship brood about unfinished business in life as the tidal waves approach. Amid all these irredeemable calamities, the daughter of the US President has time to chitchat with a cute scientist: "I hadn't kissed a boy until I got to college." At least not graduate school, lady.

People will flock to see 2012 for its destructive spectacles, and there's no doubt Hollywood has evolved to the point that their computer animators can generate any image the mind can imagine, without exception. If Cecille B Demille's low-tech crew could wow us with the parting of the Red Sea 50 years ago, the showmanship to which Roland Emmerich - a man obsessed with apocalyptic gospels - has subscribed in all his films, from Independence Day to Godzilla to The Day After Tomorrow, in his role as a cog in the Hollywood machine, seems like an inevitable procession. This is simply what a lot of people do for a living (and get paid a lot for, thanks to us.)

The point is, what does the image make us feel? Demille's Biblical pageant aimed for a spiritual quotient, while old-fashioned disaster films like, say The Poseidon Adventure were born out of a sense of primitive fear. For a few seconds you sense the spectre of your own mortality in those films. Then the prospects of the Nuclear Holocaust instilled in many filmmakers who grew up in the 1960s the inevitability of Doomsday - and alien invasion - while the 21st century paranoia has a deep environmental root, like Emmerich's own The Day After Tomorrow.

Yet in 2012, the destruction of cities, countries, and even the Himalayas brags a dose of vulgarity in it. Aren't we supposed to be frightened by the end of humanity? Aren't we supposed to feel, at the very least, a slight tremble watching our inescapable fate? The movie presents the faceless catastrophe as a form of wonderful, gung-ho excitement. It's a video-game mentality, and at 140 minutes you can't help but feeling tired and numb. I completely understand if the argument goes that this is popcorn entertainment, but I urge us all to pause and think that when a movie tries to convince us that it's okay to be stupid since it's "entertainment" - and when Hollywood keeps pounding us over and over again with such movies while enriching themselves beyond parody - that sounds more like the genuine end of civilisation.

The shallow drama - written to teach us about the love of family and humanity - only compounds the accidentally comical air of the whole enterprise. To teach us about love and the value of life, you don't need an epic film about the devastation of the world. You just need a small film made with humanism, humility and sincerity. And we just need to look elsewhere.

A brief history of the universe

A brief history of the universe

Ambitious new Thai film opens World Film Festival, plus other highlights

• Published: 6/11/2009 at 12:00 AM
• Newspaper section: Realtime

Jao Nok Krajok (Mundane History) Screening tonight at 8pm (invitation only) and Nov 12 at 9:45pm, Paragon Cineplex

Mundane History is a family drama with a cosmic aspiration.

Every history is mundane because life is mundane, repetitive, ephemeral, predestined to fall apart and evaporate, just like the brightest of stars, before they are born again to pay off their karma in this cyclical inevitability. Or so it goes, with a touch of benign nihilism and supernova spiritualism, in Anocha Suwichakornpong's Jao Nok Krajok (Mundane History), manifestly the most ambitious feature debut from a Thai director this year. Following its world premiere in Pusan last month, the movie is opening the World Film Festival of Bangkok tonight at 8pm, with another screening on Nov 12.

Anocha's seemingly ordinary, astutely structured family drama slowly reveals its cosmic aspiration, as she frames life and politics in an astronomical similitude that will both astound and bewilder the audience. Written over three years, Anocha's story takes place mostly in the confines of a house inhabited by a paralysed son, his elusive father, and the male nurse hired to take care of the wheelchair-bound son. Downstairs, the servants exchange gossip about their masters. The silent hatred that the estranged son bears against his uncommunicative father is witnessed by the nurse, an outsider, and the dynamic of this failed family (failed state?) and broken embraces seem to be the movie's primary concern.

Until the narrative of the film itself is ruptured: then Mundane History morphs and loops into a metaphor of the human condition and the helplessness that every person - every country, every civilisation, every universe - must face as a part of our karmic roulette and evolutionary cycle.

As the film suggests, this human condition is biological, sociological, sci-fi and, yes, political. The movie, in an oblique way that will, again, perplex sections of viewers, offers its reflection on our recent political chaos. To many though, this move will only seem natural, since politics has proved its power to condition the daily lives in this country during the past few years, and it's our primary-coloured politics of late (blue included) that has stirred in our hearts the unspoken fear of total collapse - of the End, the apocalypse now. In its blueprint, Mundane History begins as a family history and then flirts with the possibility of becoming a history of the country, then of the entire universe. It's somewhat overreaching, sure, but such boldness is as bracing as it is difficult to grasp. For a first film, the headlong plunge into conceptual adventure is taken with a good mix of self-belief and gambling spirit by the filmmaker.

If Mundane History is flawed, it is in the writer-director's attempt to curdle her inspirations and ideas into a piece that's also emotionally involving. The film, in parts, is wrapped in coldness and academicism, even in the final sequence that aims for a strangely uplifting message. I only wish that had the film felt warmer and more intimate, especially in the relationship between the frustrated son and his nurse, the allegory would feel less distant and more powerful; in short, that would make us more connected to the characters. That way, we would feel that even when all is lost, when all stars burst into cosmic dust, feelings that are closer to our hearts still remain, and still make us human.

Shall we also discuss the fact that the film includes a shot of male frontal nudity? This by a female film director, in an atmosphere that most male directors at work are meek, to say the least? That's a moot point actually, since the shot is inseparably relevant to the essence of the film, and only perverts and morons would find it erotic in any way.

When the film festival organisers submitted the film to the censorship board, or the subcommittee of the rating board, to make them sound more human, their concern was divided equally in part about the movie's nudity and in part about the politics. Yet after a round of explanation (or explanations), the board let it pass with a severe 20-plus rating (ID checks at the entrance). What a chapter of mundane history would it be had they not? Like the movie suggests, at the end everything will be gone. But at least while they last, some films should be watched and thought about. This is certainly one of them.

A brief history of the universe

Jao Nok Krajok (Mundane History) Screening tonight at 8pm (invitation only) and Nov 12 at 9:45pm, Paragon Cineplex

Mundane History is a family drama with a cosmic aspiration.
Every history is mundane because life is mundane, repetitive, ephemeral, predestined to fall apart and evaporate, just like the brightest of stars, before they are born again to pay off their karma in this cyclical inevitability. Or so it goes, with a touch of benign nihilism and supernova spiritualism, in Anocha Suwichakornpong's Jao Nok Krajok (Mundane History), manifestly the most ambitious feature debut from a Thai director this year. Following its world premiere in Pusan last month, the movie is opening the World Film Festival of Bangkok tonight at 8pm, with another screening on Nov 12.
Anocha's seemingly ordinary, astutely structured family drama slowly reveals its cosmic aspiration, as she frames life and politics in an astronomical similitude that will both astound and bewilder the audience. Written over three years, Anocha's story takes place mostly in the confines of a house inhabited by a paralysed son, his elusive father, and the male nurse hired to take care of the wheelchair-bound son. Downstairs, the servants exchange gossip about their masters. The silent hatred that the estranged son bears against his uncommunicative father is witnessed by the nurse, an outsider, and the dynamic of this failed family (failed state?) and broken embraces seem to be the movie's primary concern.
Until the narrative of the film itself is ruptured: then Mundane History morphs and loops into a metaphor of the human condition and the helplessness that every person - every country, every civilisation, every universe - must face as a part of our karmic roulette and evolutionary cycle.
As the film suggests, this human condition is biological, sociological, sci-fi and, yes, political. The movie, in an oblique way that will, again, perplex sections of viewers, offers its reflection on our recent political chaos. To many though, this move will only seem natural, since politics has proved its power to condition the daily lives in this country during the past few years, and it's our primary-coloured politics of late (blue included) that has stirred in our hearts the unspoken fear of total collapse - of the End, the apocalypse now. In its blueprint, Mundane History begins as a family history and then flirts with the possibility of becoming a history of the country, then of the entire universe. It's somewhat overreaching, sure, but such boldness is as bracing as it is difficult to grasp. For a first film, the headlong plunge into conceptual adventure is taken with a good mix of self-belief and gambling spirit by the filmmaker.
If Mundane History is flawed, it is in the writer-director's attempt to curdle her inspirations and ideas into a piece that's also emotionally involving. The film, in parts, is wrapped in coldness and academicism, even in the final sequence that aims for a strangely uplifting message. I only wish that had the film felt warmer and more intimate, especially in the relationship between the frustrated son and his nurse, the allegory would feel less distant and more powerful; in short, that would make us more connected to the characters. That way, we would feel that even when all is lost, when all stars burst into cosmic dust, feelings that are closer to our hearts still remain, and still make us human.
Shall we also discuss the fact that the film includes a shot of male frontal nudity? This by a female film director, in an atmosphere that most male directors at work are meek, to say the least? That's a moot point actually, since the shot is inseparably relevant to the essence of the film, and only perverts and morons would find it erotic in any way.
When the film festival organisers submitted the film to the censorship board, or the subcommittee of the rating board, to make them sound more human, their concern was divided equally in part about the movie's nudity and in part about the politics. Yet after a round of explanation (or explanations), the board let it pass with a severe 20-plus rating (ID checks at the entrance). What a chapter of mundane history would it be had they not? Like the movie suggests, at the end everything will be gone. But at least while they last, some films should be watched and thought about. This is certainly one of them.