The Hague – You may have thought that my first post from The Netherlands would’ve been about something other than a Hollywood movie. Oh how wrong you were.

Those of you who know me or who listened to the last Panic Manual podcast that I was on may know this already, but at the end of September I moved from Toronto to The Hague to head up the Panic Manual’s new European Bureau, and also to work for a large international justice organization for six months. I haven’t been to a concert here yet, even though Massive Attack came through Amsterdam a few weeks ago (I didn’t go because I just started listening to their “Splitting the Atom” EP two weeks before their show and I don’t like it). Patrick Watson came through The Hague just a week or two ago too as part of a festival calling Crossing Borders, but tickets were sold out, plus I’ve seen him twice already this year, and the festival headliners were Tegan & Sara, who I’ve seen once and that was enough, and Stephen Malkmus, who I figured probably doesn’t play Pavement songs as part of his live sets anymore.

Anyway, the update on the formation of the Panic Manual European Bureau is that I haven’t decided yet whether to call myself the PM European Bureau Chief or the PM Chief European Correspondent, and that I basically haven’t done anything in the last two months that I was compelled to write about here. This is because no one but my close friends and family wants to see me write about my work (if you are interested in that, you can watch this video instead) or my social life here, I’m trying desperately not to be so arrogant as to write some kind of “Europe is so different from Canada lolz OMG” bullshit, and only Ricky is interested in pictures and descriptions of what Dutch cuisine is like. Seriously, Ricky bugs me for pictures of food. It’s a little strange. Incidentally, as near as I can tell Dutch cuisine consists almost entirely of french fries, sandwiches, soft cheese, bad fried snack food like bitterballen, and German beer

Last night, though, I went to the local cinema for the first time with a couple of friends, and we decided to see 2012. And this…this is worth writing about, especially since no one else at the site has written about it yet.

Not because 2012 is a particularly good movie, oh no. It’s because I’m not sure when the last time was that I’ve seen a movie that so totally and precisely met my expectations in virtually every way.

I mean, no one anywhere went into 2012 expecting a film masterpiece. After “Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and that crappy 90’s “Godzilla” movie with Matthew Broderick, it’s pretty obvious what you’re going to get from a Roland Emmerich disaster movie. It’s going to be big, silly, and loud, with some dodgy pseudo-science, lots of explosions, a cursory love story and/or family togetherness theme, a passing stab at some heroic moralizing and/or inspiring speech, and several scenes where the hero narrowly escapes some massive special effects death that’s RIGHT behind him.

And that pretty much sums up 2012 in it’s entirety. And those other three movies too, as far as I can remember. In 2012, Chiwetel Ejiofor is a hero scientist who figures out what’s going on first as some kind of US government science guy; he has to do most of the moralizing speeches and hand-wringing about people dying, while also trying to get into Thandie Newton’s pants. Newton plays the daughter of Danny Glover, who’s playing the US President, and is actually referred to at one point as “The First Daughter,” which leads to all kinds of jokes about her “First Anatomy” that I won’t get into (but feel free to do so in the comments section). John Cusack is an unsuccessful writer who not only gets most of the special effects death escapes from earthquakes and collapsing cities and volcanoes, but is also trying to both save his family and redeem himself in their eyes; he’s divorced and separated from his wife (an alarmingly old-looking Amanda Peet) and two children for being a self-centred jerk. I don’t know why, but nobody can play a self-centred jerk and still be a sympathetic character like John Cusack. Maybe he’s a sympathetic self-centred jerk in real life, too, and that’s why he’s so good at it.

Emmerich wisely chooses not to mention the whole idea that the Mayan calendar predicted the world would end in 2012 too much, except when a character briefly tosses it out or a news report in the background mentions it. This is wise, because it’s mostly bunk for people who think Nostradamus could predict the future (yes, the Mayan long-count calendar ends in 2012, but there’s nothing to suggest that that’s because they thought the world was going to end in that year. It’s a lot more likely they thought 2012 would be a good time for a big party).

He also doesn’t dwell too much on the pseudo-science, which is a terrible mash-up of planets aligning, solar flares, neutrino particles, and a couple of widely discredited, half-baked theories about the cataclysmic shift of the magnetic poles and the displacement of the Earth’s crust. This is also wise, because it’s complete bunk that even a first-year physics student will tell you wouldn’t work (starting with the idea that neutrinos don’t at all work the way they say they do in the movie, and if the Earth’s core heated up to the point where the crust shifted like it does in the movie we’d all be dead long before that shift happened).

And yeah, we could get into how dumb the science and/or history are, how thinly written the female leads are, how cliche most of the supporting characters are, how improbable a lot of the “just barely escaped” sequences are, how moronic most of the dialogue and inspiring speeches are, how wooden a lot of the acting is, and how pervasive the Sony product placement is (everyone in this movie has a Vaio laptop and a Sony Ericsson phone. Sony can only dream that their stuff was that popular). But to me it seems kind of disingenuous to criticize 2012 on those grounds, because we all knew that this was going to be true of this movie going in. I did find it a bit funny how the death of some people in the movie was really fretted over by the characters, while the death of others is basically ignored. Particularly when Cusack and co. are in Vegas and escape the crumbling city in a massive cargo plane with a bunch of expensive cars in the hold and don’t even consider dumping the cars in favour of the few hundred people they could’ve fit in there. Kind of a dick move.

Still, after a big meal at Vapiano after a long week I was looking for a movie that would keep me awake and offer some cheap thrills, and 2012 was that, if nothing else. Yes, I laughed out loud hysterically at the ridiculous, over-the-top escape from a crumbling Los Angeles, first in a limousine, then a small plane, but I was fully expecting to do that too.

If you don’t like big, dumb Hollywood movies where lots of things blow up, you won’t like 2012 one bit. However, if you’re looking for a silly diversionary movie in the well established special effects worldwide disaster movie that Emmerich is one of the biggest proprietors of, you could do a lot worse. It’s a two out of five, over-the-top movie, and that’s ok sometimes.

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