Here Comes the Amockalypse 3 comments

By Bradford Winters

Needless to say, it’s a safe bet that Sony Pictures didn’t intend its Friday release of 2012 several weeks back to coincide with that Sunday’s readings in the Episcopal lectionary. But as the Spirit sometimes moves in ways that aren’t so mysterious, I had to laugh at the fact that the cyclical readings that opening weekend of the doomsday spectacle just happened to feature both the eschatological vision of Daniel 12 and the “Little Apocalypse” of Mark 13.

2012—the latest turd-jerker from Roland Emmerich, Hollywood’s reigning doyen of what is surely a genre unto itself at this point—let’s call it “amockalyptic”—follows his first two installments of cosmic havoc unleashed in Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. (Lest you think End of Days would have made a more thematically continuous title than 2012, it went to a Schwarzenegger film back in 1999.)

The premise of Emmerich’s most recent (and purportedly last) contribution to the genre hardly needs explication, what with all the pop eschatology currently spewing like lava from basic misunderstandings of the Mayan calendar that ends with the year 2012.

And yet, despite Sony’s readiness to cash in on the craze with a marketing campaign that plays to the ancient Mayan pretext, the film itself hardly bothers with the Mayans or their calendar that give it license for 157 minutes of digitized global destruction. (Save for a faux news clip that reports a mass Mayan suicide once things go haywire. Nice.)

Not that Emmerich and his oeuvre don’t have a special place in my heart. To the contrary, on the first date night with my wife after our first daughter was born, we bolted for the theaters to see The Day After Tomorrow. And let me tell you, several months in to dirty diapers and sleepless nights, to constant laundry and rare sex, it was semi-cathartic to see Mother Earth go the way of a crazed parent and lose it on her brood.

But this time it was different. Granted that no catharsis was in store, with a second child under our belt and the days of first-time parenthood a distant memory. 2012 being, in Emmerich’s own words, “the mother of all disaster films,” this time the special effects took an approach that not only leaves no stone unturned, but hits you on the head with every stone along the way, until the spectacle is something to be endured more than enjoyed.

And Emmerich’s blasé attitude to certain political concerns in the undertaking didn’t help the cause either:

According to Emmerich: “My co-writer, Harald Kloser said, ‘I’m not writing this to get a fatwa on my head.’ We have Jesus falling apart in all kinds of forms. The Vatican falls on people’s heads, and we can do that because we’re a free, Western society, but if there would be, like, Mecca destroyed, there would be an outrage.... If I cannot destroy a big high-rise anymore, because terrorists blew up two of the most famous ones, the twin towers, what does this say about our world?”

It says, Roland, that the horrors of 9/11 might call for a corrective on your blow-it-all-up notions of entertainment; it says that indiscriminate civic destruction in a film that admits to fears of Muslim reprisal is questionable at best and pathetically distasteful at worst.

And if you’re going to spend $200,000,000 — I repeat, two hundred million dollars — showing earth go to hell in a bucket of popcorn, please don’t play the spokesman and perch our freedoms on the tenet that nothing is sacred.

Being a screenwriter myself, I’m never too inclined to take swipes at fellow members of the trade, but come on. Somebody get this man a (better) publicist!

So it was with a delightful touch of synchronicity that opening weekend of the film that in my first rotation in the lector’s guild at church I stood up to read the eschatological passages of Daniel 12 and Mark 13.

I had already experienced a personal note of synchronicity upon getting my first assignment in the guild, as the Daniel passage is featured prominently in a book I had recently devoured about the concept of resurrection: Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life, a magisterial feat of exegesis by Harvard scholar Jon D. Levenson, who argues that belief in the Resurrection is not only part and parcel of traditional Judaism, but a central axis upon which Judaism traditionally revolves.

Perhaps this is where Emmerich would take a swipe back at me, openly opposed as he is to “organized religion.” (I use quotes not only because it is such a tiresome phrase, but one whose implied counterpart, “random spirituality,” isn’t all that flattering of opponents like Emmerich; just call it religion. And the Church has been plenty disorganized itself, thank you very much.)

Let him swipe. Rightfully so, perhaps, if much of what I’ve written here sounds like the rant of a sanctimonious prig. But if 2012 does turn out to be more than the Y2K of the twenty-first century, or any year following in my lifetime for that matter, I’ll take the Daniel—

At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book....

and the Mark—

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs....

any day of the week.

On second thought, make that Day of the Weak.