2012 the Movie: A Disaster for Christians

I’m a fan of disaster movies. I’ve watched all of them and, more problematically, I’ve enjoyed almost all of them. I had circled the release of Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster thrill ride, 2012, for a long time. Emmerich directed Independence Day, which just happens to be the best disaster movie ever, so I was pretty confident that I would enjoy this movie of CGI-ed destruction.

[The rest of this post is under the category SPOILER ALERT. But really, there's not much to spoil: it's a disaster movie about the end of the world, what do you think happens?]

Most of it was truly awful. If I were a dog, I’d have spent all of the emotional character development moments licking my own butt. It’s not at all clear that the writers of this movie have ever opened a science textbook or even made it through an entire episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy. The “bad guy” (Oliver Platt) was the only character that acted as if he was in an apocalyptic scenario, which unbalances the movie and means that you are openly rooting for the bad guy to shoot the “good guy” (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in the face by the end of the movie. Danny Glover — who is officially “too old for this s***” — is so bad that he made me reconsider whether black people are truly qualified to be President. And as True/Slant’s Ryan Sager explains, the ending is ruined by product placement.

Needless to say, I loved it. Emmerich throws an aircraft carrier into the White House. He crashes a boat into Mount Everest. I can see Danny Glover experience human emotion in lots of movies. 2012 is the only movie that lets me see the Dalai Lama murdered by a giant tsunami.

Oh, didn’t I mention that Emmerich kills the Dalai Lama in this movie? Yeah, and the Pope too. And he breaks a bunch of religious buildings. Come to think of it, this movie might be more openly hostile towards religion than Bill Maher’s Religulous.

As I said, I think I’ve watched every disaster movie ever made. I know that there are two ways of dealing with religion in these movies: A) Ignore it entirely, B) Have a secondary character derive inner strength from spiritual beliefs. Those are really the only two ways that I’ve seen it handled. You can’t have your main character using Holy Ghost Power to stop the meteor, because that just pisses off all of the non-believers who also buy movie tickets. But you can have one character spend the movie clutching a cross who miraculously survives. Think Jud Hirsch in the Rabbinical prayer circle near the end of Independence Day. Nobody gets angry when a nun somehow avoids getting her faced burned off even when there is lava flowing two inches away from her habit.

Well I get angry because I believe that liquid rocks radiate much more heat than Hollywood writers think they do. Remember, I’m in it for the death and destruction.

But I wasn’t at all prepared for the Christian death at St. Peter’s Basilica scene. All world leaders have a place where they are supposed to go to survive the destruction, but the Italian prime minister stays behind. Oliver Platt hisses “The Italian prime minister has decided to trust to the power of prayer,” and moves onto other logical things. When we catch up with the Italian PM, he’s at St. Pete’s. The camera pans back to show a bunch of other people praying in the square, and you catch a quick glimpse of the Pope’s funny hat. You have to be paying attention, because just above the Papal Headgear is a giant wave that promptly crashes down on the Basilica, toppling it (and the Pope) over, and killing everybody.

It’s just not something you see everyday. Nor do you see the Sistine Chapel breaking up right along the line where God is giving Adam a high-five, and then come crashing down. Nor do you see the Cristo Redentor statute in Brazil crumbling — open Jesus arms first. And you certainly don’t see the Dalai Lama  patiently sipping tea and then ringing a bell as a death wave crests over the Himalayas and into his house.

With all this destruction of religious idols, it’s worth noting that Emmerich didn’t lay CGI waste to Mecca or Jerusalem. Chris Kelly of the Huffington Post points out  that some Christians will be pissed just because Emmerich didn’t kill enough Muslims (Mmm … feel the interfaith love).  Oh, he showed Mecca and a bunch of Muslims praying. There’s the clear implication that they all died too. But he didn’t actually go through with destroying the Holy City. He didn’t have a rogue tornado rip up the Masjid al Haram and fling it into a flaming Suez Canal aflame with burning oil tankers. Or maybe he did but the producers wanted to be able sell the DVD in the Middle East, I don’t know.

What I do know is that in 2012, if you stopped and prayed, or thought about stopping and praying, you had a 100% mortality rate. The worst scientist in the world — Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character was criminally wrong about everything for the entire movie — was never in any danger but the President couldn’t even read a prayer to the nation before a volcanic dust cloud cut off his satellite feed. There weren’t even any Mayans — whose pagan Gods prophesied the entire premise of the movie — that survived because of their faith.

Now, I’m fine with all of this. Nobody ever got persecuted by a disaster movie. No lions or Christians were actually harmed in the making of 2012.

But Christian conservatives should be warned. This is a secular movie that treats faith as a petty superstition which negatively impacts “survivability.” Jesus does not win this one. Science and human ingenuity punks Jesus and Friends at every conceivable point during this movie.

I’m just saying, you guys might want to sit this one out. I’m sure Tyler Perry will have a new movie out for the holidays about a black man in a fat suit that overcomes losing his job on Wall Street through church and family meals.