DOWN (Dining Out With Nerds) report: 2012

Recently, DOWN met for dinner at Bertucci’s. Everyone enjoyed their food and the service was good. I had a build-your-own calzone with mushrooms, garlic, fresh peppers, very tasty. We were near an entire table of partying eight-year-olds, but they were not too obnoxious. Discussions included the upcoming RG, Japanese SF movies, and why was Shoshana reading an actual book instead of her usual Kindle.

Two people went to see The Fourth Kind. The first kind of close encounter is sighting; second is evidence; third is contact; fourth is abduction, or anal probes. Maybe both. Although it stars Milla Jovovich, the reviews were pretty bad, so Lynda and I went to see 2012.

I expected to hate this movie, but it turned out to be a pretty decent action movie. Don’t expect a lot of logic; this barely made more sense than Babylon AD. Rather, think of it as a planetary Titanic, only with less-interesting characters. That’s right: our Earth hits the submerged portion of a neutrino cloud and sinks in the icy interplanetary vacuum, with only the heroic actions of a band of everyday citizens to save the world.

The movie flailed around wildly for a while trying to explain the origins of the disaster. The phrase “mutating neutrinos” made me very unhappy. Yes, neutrinos spontaneously change between three flavors, but none of them interact enough with matter (much less only matter beneath the Earth’s surface) to be noticeable. Just forget about logic for this movie and watch the pretty pictures.

The script was really weak. For a two-and-a-half hour movie it had a remarkable shortage of quotable lines, and the characters were mostly shallow caricatures. John Cusack was pretty good, as always (as the main character, he had the most to do), Woody Harrelson had a narrow character but filled it excellently, Oliver Platt was decent, and everyone else was there just to deliver their lines. The idiot New Husband was annoying and unbelievable. (“I’m only qualified on single-engine planes! This has two engines!” Of course! That’s a great reason to just stand there and die instead!) But mostly it’s a movie about special effects and hair-breadth escapes. The CGI was excellent, clear and usually not so cluttered as to be incomprehensible.

Cusack’s character, of course, missed his ex-wife and kids and regretted not paying more attention to them. That was about the extent of the personal themes. Well, there were a few more, but with barely more realism than the movie’s physics and geology.

Some people will love this movie, some people will hate it. You could have different reactions depending on your mood.

As each disaster movie must out-do the previous one, I await the sequel: our Milky Way Galaxy hits the submerged portion of a quasar and sinks in the icy intergalactic vacuum, with only the heroic actions of a band of everyday humans to save a million intelligent species.