*Warning: Here be spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.*
Do you remember seeing Independence Day in the theaters? I clearly recall how blown away I was by the ground-breaking special effects. They blew up the White House! OMG! And it looked so real! CGI, I think I love you.
Nowadays blowing up National Monuments has become standard fare in disaster movies and the wow-factor is gone. We’ve grown immune to the White House being blasted to smithereens. Now, if a movie wants to impress us, it has to find a new way to destroy our icons. The FX have to be bigger, badder, and louder.
To that goal, the new movie 2012 seems to be operating under the motto Leave No National Treasure Undestroyed!** Yellowstone? Toast. The National Monument, the Las Vegas Strip, the Vatican, a Buddhist temple & the Christ the Redeemer monument in Rio de Janeiro – all casualties of our need for more destruction to get the same emotional reaction we had to Independence Day. I’ve grown bored with the same old disaster carnage. It just doesn’t do it for me anymore.
Sadly, that was more or less my reaction to this movie. 2012 just didn’t do it for me. It was the end of the world as we know it, and I felt fine. No emotional engagement whatsoever. Though, on the plus side, the special effects were pretty darn cool and the body count was gratuitously high.
Speaking of the body count, by the end of the movie I felt like there was a timer going off every five minutes, announcing it was time to kill off another secondary character in a completely senseless way. Bing! Death to the pilot. Bing! Death to the scientist. Bing! Death to the billionaire. Bing! Death to the boyfriend. Bing! Death to the tramp. Like clockwork. It wasn’t a good movie to be the disposable archetype.
But if you were a member of the hero’s family, the screenwriter would perform contortions of logic never before seen on film to ensure you survive every sure-death situation. I’m not going to touch the laws of physics they made mock of, cuz it’s a disaster movie and if I can handle drilling into an asteroid to plant a bomb to save the world, I can take anything.
The dialogue was wooden, but the part of the writing I found most fascinating was the way the screenwriter applied the “write what you know” adage to a movie about the end of the world. Our hero was a writer, estranged from his family because he spent all his time at his computer crafting a brilliant novel that sold only 422 copies. By the mid-point of the film, I was actively wondering what the screenwriter’s marital status was and whether he was using the film to work through his own post-divorce, my-novel-wasn’t-the-breakout-success-it-was-supposed-to-be issues. I could just see him sitting alone in his lonely bachelor apartment, pounding out the pages that will become 2012. “Come the end of the world, all will be forgiven, and we will live happily ever after, even though I totally screwed up my marriage the first time by being a selfish punk. My book will survive the apocalypse, I’ll save the world and she’ll see.” Ya think?
So what’s your favorite end of days movie? How about a favorite blowin’-up-a-national-monument scene?
Or, on the writing front, how much of your own life creeps into your stories? Do you think it makes them stronger? Is there a line at which “write what you know” stops resonating with the reader and becomes self-indulgent? Are there a disproportionate number of books and movies about writers because that is what we know?
** The one international treasure they didn’t destroy was a Mayan pyramid. How poetic would that have been? But, alas, the movie didn’t have that strong a grip on irony. Nary a Mayan relic in sight. *sigh*
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Vivi Andrews is a movie junkie who writes ghostly romantic comedies and steamy shapeshifter stories for Samhain Publishing. For more about her or her books, please visit www.viviandrews.com.
