2012 (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | 2012 |
| Original title | 2012 |
 | |
| Country of production | United States , Canada |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2009 |
| length | 158 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 12 JMK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Roland Emmerich |
| script | Roland Emmerich Harald Kloser |
| production | Harald Kloser Mark Gordon Larry J. Franco |
| music | Harald Kloser Thomas Wander |
| camera | Dean Semler |
| cut |
David Brenner Peter S. Elliot |
| occupation | |
| |
2012 (alternative title 2012 - The End of the World ) is a US-Canadian disaster film by director Roland Emmerich from 2009 . The world premiere took place on November 11th, the German premiere on November 12th, 2009. The main roles are played by John Cusack , Chiwetel Ejiofor , Amanda Peet , Danny Glover , Thandie Newton , Oliver Platt and Woody Harrelson . The film dominated the opening weekend with position 1 in US cinemas and grossed a production budget of 200 million US dollars worldwide in just four days. After just ten days, the film revenue already exceeded the 450 million dollar mark and after 100 days, the box office was around 760 million US dollars.
content
The film is based on the idea that after the Long Count of the Mayan Calendar ends in 2012, the world will end. The film takes up Charles Hapgood's 1958 hypothesis of the pole shift or a sudden massive continental drift that leads to the end of the world with numerous accompanying phenomena such as earthquakes , sinkholes , volcanic eruptions and tsunamis .
action
In 2009, the scientist Dr. Satnam Tsurutani in a former copper mine in India caused a sharp rise in the temperature of the earth's crust. He informs his American colleague Adrian Helmsley, scientific advisor on the US President's staff, that in his opinion an unusually strong solar flare and the associated violent neutrino radiation heat the Earth's core. Calculations show that by 2012 the earth's crust will begin to melt. This would make the tectonic plates of the earth's crust unstable and break apart with the consequence of megatsunamis , volcanic eruptions and earthquakes - the earth would be uninhabitable. The US President inaugurates his G8 counterparts , and a secret, international government program is underway to build arks in China . With these, a sufficiently large number of people, animals and human culture should be saved to ensure the continued existence of humanity. In addition to people selected on the basis of their achievements or knowledge, a seat can also be bought by those who can raise the price of one billion euros per ticket so that this project can even be implemented.
The unsuccessful writer Jackson Curtis worked as a driver in Los Angeles in 2012, including for the Russian billionaire Yuri Karpov. A cult-motivated mass suicide in the Mayan ruins of Tikal in Guatemala is reported on television . Jackson's ex-wife Kate lives separated from Jackson with their children Lilly and Noah and has a new partner, cosmetic surgeon Gordon Silberman. When Jackson picks up the two children for a week-long camping holiday in Yellowstone National Park , they hear the doomsday scenarios of the conspiracy theorist Charlie Frost, who broadcasts on his pirate radio from Yellowstone Park, on the radio. In the park, Jackson wants to show his children the lake where he used to camp with Kate, but the lake has dried up and a restricted military area has emerged. They are arrested when they enter the exclusion zone. At the military base, where the strong seismic activity of the Yellowstone Caldera is monitored, Jackson meets Adrian Helmsley, who turns out to be one of the few readers of his novel. You will be escorted out of the zone by the military. At the campsite, they meet Frost, who tells Jackson of the approaching end of the world and explains that the government is building spaceships in a secret location to save some chosen ones - he even has a map of this location. Jackson sees this as paranoia on the part of Frost.
Meanwhile, people are being murdered in an attempt to warn the population of the impending threat. Helmsley discovers that his calculations were incorrect. The earth's crust is warming faster than expected and the tectonic plates are starting to dissolve. He convinces Anheuser, the White House chief of staff, and the President to begin the evacuation immediately. The participating countries then start their secret rescue programs and, with increasing difficulties, begin to get around 400,000 people into the arks.
At the same time, ever stronger quakes are shaking California along the San Andreas Fault . While shopping, Kate and Gordon are surprised by a tremor in the supermarket, whereupon Kate calls Jackson frightened and demands that the children be brought back. Upon returning, Jackson notes with growing bitterness that his son apparently likes his stepfather more than himself. His grief is interrupted by a call from Karpov asking Jackson to pick up the billionaire's twin sons and take them to the airport. When they board a plane, one of the two viciously remarks that they have a ticket for "a big ship" and would survive as a result. Jackson takes this very seriously in the face of events and rents a small plane. Just before he gets to his children and ex-wife, a new, major earthquake begins in Los Angeles. As buildings collapse and streets tear open around them, they flee through the city to the airport and manage to take off at the last second. Los Angeles is sinking under them in an apocalyptic scenario.
Jackson, meanwhile convinced of the impending end of the world, now wants to return to Yellowstone to get the map with the location of the arks from Frost. Together with his daughter, he searches for frost. You can find him at the edge of the caldera , from where he continues to broadcast and share his impressions. When Jackson asks Frost for the map, the caldera suddenly rises and geysers erupt. Frost stays behind at his own request, and Jackson races back to the airfield with Lilly in Frost's motor home and the map inside. Behind them, the volcano under the Yellowstone breaks up in a gigantic explosion and hurls huge rocks and ashes into the sky. Frost dies immediately, but Jackson and the others can take off again at the last second with the plane, which flies away from the spreading ash cloud.
From Frost's map, it turns out that the arks are being built in China. Since the range of their plane is too short, they land in Las Vegas . There they meet again Karpov, who is stuck with his two sons, his girlfriend Tamara and his pilot Sasha, because his evacuation plane was damaged. Now the earth is beginning to shake in Las Vegas as well, and the deadly ash cloud of the Yellowstone eruption is approaching. Sasha manages to organize an Antonov transport plane. The ash cloud reached Las Vegas at the moment when the now larger group of refugees flies out in the Antonov and heads for China. Below them, Las Vegas is sinking in the ash rain and torn apart by the earthquakes. The refugees' plan to refuel in Hawaii comes to nothing when they only find a lava-flooded volcanic island on their approach. With no hope of reaching China with the remaining fuel, they fly on towards the South China Sea .
Meanwhile, Helmsley is on his way to the arks in China with Air Force One . Anheuser has taken command for the Americans after President Wilson stayed in the White House at his own request and the Vice President died. Reports of disasters arrive from all over the world, the news is decreasing, and radio and television are silent. The tectonic plate shift is now reaching its climax, the continents are sinking, shifting or being lifted up. Gigantic tsunamis roll over the seas and completely flood the continents.
The Himalayas , where the arks are stationed, will also be reached and washed over by the masses of water in a few hours. The arks are not, as Frost suspected, spaceships, but gigantic ships that are constructed like closed lifeboats in anticipation of the global floods and each designed for 100,000 people. It also turns out that of the nine arks under construction, only four were finished, one of which was nearly destroyed by the earthquakes. Upon landing, Helmsley and Laura, the President's daughter, enter the ark. They both got a little closer after Laura had to say goodbye to her father during the flight. President Wilson died with many other refugees at the White House when Washington was flooded and the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy destroyed the White House.
Jackson Curtis and the other refugees' plane has now run out of fuel; they prepare to ditch in the sea, not knowing what to expect below. When the plane breaks through the cloud cover, they find that the continents have already shifted thousands of kilometers - the Himalayas are directly below them. Sasha dies in the subsequent crash landing on a glacier. Shortly afterwards they are overflown by helicopters that take animals to the arks. One of them lands and takes Karpov and his children with him - they can show tickets for seats in an ark. Jackson and his family as well as Gordon and Tamara are left behind. They are marching on towards the arks when they come across Nima, a Tibetan monk. He is with his grandparents on the way to the arks, where his brother works as a technician and now wants to secretly smuggle his family into one of the arks. You can convince Nima to take her with you.
Once in the ark, Helmsley received a phone call from his friend Tsurutani, who was not evacuated as promised. Tsurutani wishes Adrian all the best in the face of the approaching tidal wave and says goodbye to him. Helmsley has to overhear the death of his friend, but based on his description he can determine that the Megatsunami will reach the Valley of the Arks faster than expected. Instead of several hours, which would be necessary for a coordinated embarkation of all people in the dock , only half an hour remains. Anheuser orders the arks to be closed immediately, and thousands of people who were supposed to be moved to the fourth ship remain in the dock, including Karpov and his children.
Nima's brother is waiting for his family at a side entrance to the docks. Under his leadership, the small troop sneaks into one of the arks through a maintenance entrance. When, in the meantime, against the resistance of Anheuser, Helmsley appeals with a moving plea to the heads of state in the other arks to choose humanity in the face of the disaster, they decide to open the bulkheads again and let the people into the docks. When opening the bulkhead, Gordon is crushed by the oversized gears. When the ark's stern flap is about to be closed again, the metal screwdriver that the group used to gain access to the ship jams in the gears and the bulkhead cannot be closed. Jackson and the others are trapped and the ark cannot be sealed when the wave hits and floods the valley. Water enters the ark and the bulkheads are automatically closed, with Tamara drowning in one of the flooded areas and Karpov in the docks sacrificing his life for that of his children. The masses of water hurled Air Force One against the mounts of the ark, so that it was torn away and threatened to collide with the north face of Mount Everest . While the water continues to enter, Jackson, with the help of his son Noah, is able to remove the screwdriver and the bulkhead closes. Now the engines can be started and a collision between the ark and Mount Everest can be prevented.
A few weeks later, the earth came to rest, the air became clearer again, the continents have radically changed. Adrian and Laura are a couple, Jackson has made up with his ex-wife and children. The arks open their hatches on the calm ocean. You can see the three arks heading for Africa. At the end you can hear that Africa was raised and the Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal are now the highest point on earth.
synchronization
The German dubbing was carried out by FFS Film- und Fernseh-Synchron GmbH Berlin. Sven Hasper wrote the dialogue book and Axel Malzacher directed the dialogue.
|
role
|
actor
|
Voice actor
|
| Adrian Helmsley | Chiwetel Ejiofor | Tobias Kluckert |
| Jackson Curtis | John Cusack | Andreas Fröhlich |
| Kate Curtis | Amanda Peet | Christine Stichler |
| Carl Anheuser | Oliver Platt | Lutz Schnell |
| Charlie Frost | Woody Harrelson | Thomas Nero Wolff |
| Laura Wilson | Thandie Newton | Nana Spier |
| President Wilson | Danny Glover | Hartmut Becker |
| Capt. Michaels | Stephen McHattie | Frank Glaubrecht |
| German Chancellor | Merrilyn Gann | Arianne Borbach |
| Dr. Tsurutani | Jimi Mistry | Marius Clarén |
| Gordon Silberman | Thomas McCarthy | Peter Flechtner |
| Harry Helmsley | Blu Mankuma | Helmut Krauss |
| Isaacs - MI6 officer | Gerard Plunkett | Reinhard Kuhnert |
| California governor | Lyndall Grant | Thomas Danneberg |
| Lilly Curtis | Morgan Lily | Léa Mariage |
| Noah Curtis | Liam James | Lukas Schust |
| Prof. West | John Billingsley | Frank-Otto Schenk |
| Sally | Karin Konoval | Liane Rudolph |
| Sasha | Johann Urb | Rainer Doering |
| Saudi prince | Parm thrush | Tayfun Bademsoy |
| Tamara | Beatrice Rosen | Ute Noack |
| Tony Delgatto | George Segal | Otto Mellies |
| Yuri Karpov | Zlatko Buric | Mikhail Zenko |
production
The US film studio Sony Pictures Entertainment secured the film rights after director Roland Emmerich and co-producer Harald Kloser completed the script in February 2008. The production costs were calculated at around 200 million US dollars . Filming began in August of the same year in Vancouver , Canada .
Emmerich announced that the original plan was to depict the destruction of a mosque and the Kaaba , but that this was not done out of fear of radical Muslims. In the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger he said literally: “We also had a scene in the background where people were praying to Mecca in front of a mosque. And then comes the wave. It was too risky for us. It's not worth it for an entertainment film either. So we left it at the scene in Rome, where the Vatican was seized by the tidal wave. ”The fact that Emmerich had refrained from destroying the Kaaba was held against him in the South German as“ undignified submission ”.
The largest contributors to the special effects of the film had the company Uncharted Territory by Volker Engel and Marc Weigert . There, among other things, the sequence with the destruction of Los Angeles was produced. Other special effects sequences are from Double Negative (destruction of St. Peter's Basilica), Sony Pictures Imageworks (the hangar for the arks in the Himalayas) and Scanline VFX (the implementation of all tidal waves and scenes in which the water overflows land masses with the help of their software Flowline ) .
marketing
Sony Pictures created a viral marketing campaign with the so-called "Institute for Human Continuity" that portrayed the European Union headquarters in Brussels as if it belonged to the fictional institute. Thisistheend.com website, on which Charlie Frost (played by Woody Harrelson) expresses speculation about the end of the world in 2012, and farewellatlantis.com, which is dedicated to the (fictional) novel Farewell Atlantis by the protagonist Jackson Curtis, also belong to this campaign is. In Brazil, two huge posters were hung up in a subway tunnel. They gave the illusion that the tunnel was being flooded.
Reviews
The critic from kino.de finds predominantly praise. The film does not show too detailed scenes in which people die, but rather focuses on those "where there is still life". In addition to reduced pathos, drama and humor, the effects that made it Emmerich's most convincing event film also resonate. “Woody Harrelson as a conspiracy spinner in the look of Catweazle, but also a ruble billionaire between Mafioso and family man offer situation comedy. Puns are also hit, even worn-out political leaders like Schwarzenegger's government authenticity ('Don't believe him ... he only reads a script') find their target through good timing. For a $ 200 million ton truck designed like a drawing board, all of this is very entertaining and, in the end, even forgiving. Because Germany's Chancellor also survived. "
Todd McCarthy from variety.com has similar words of praise. He predicts a “global box office tunami” for Sony and finds the visual effects “pretty sensational”, which give the audience “the innovative CGI goods that they expect”.
The film also scores well at Cinema as the “perfect popcorn cinema”: “Noisy, ultra-loud effect spectacle about the end of the world, which pulls out all the stops of the disaster film.”
Georg Seeßlen, on the other hand, judges the film in Die Zeit . He is stupid and a “brute anthology of the cinematographic disaster. In the story of an unsuccessful pulverized novel producer and failed husband who becomes a hero in the apocalypse to save his family, there are earthquakes, tidal waves, plane crashes, ship sinks, fireballs, and new buildings collapsing. And on the other hand, family, perseverance, willingness to make sacrifices. […] The pathetic dialogues are stupid, the construction of world fire and family history is stupid […] ”. Seeßlen finds the computer effects, in themselves, overwhelming, but they never achieved a credible unit with the real recordings.
useful information
- The NASA and Dustin Hoffman voted the movie "2012" the most absurd science fiction film . The reason was that the Roland Emmerich film misrepresented all the facts and, by the way, had frightened many people. As a result, NASA had to set up a website to dispel the myths of the film. The Core had previously received the negative award.
- A year earlier, a mockbuster with the title 2012: Doomsday was released . A year later, with Supernova 2012 , another mockbuster appeared, which, however, lacks reference to the Mayan calendar. Both films were produced by The Asylum .
- The Dutch TV series 2012 - The Year Zero from 2009 and the Canadian disaster film Armageddon 2012 - The Last Hours of Mankind from 2011 deal with the same topic, although the latter also lacks reference to the Mayan calendar.
- In 2009, a short film of the same name by the Essen film director Marcus Overbeck was released before the theatrical release in 2012 . However, this only has the title in common with Roland Emmerich's film.
- 2012 was broadcast for the first time on German free TV on January 8, 2012 on ProSieben and reached a total audience of 7.92 million viewers.
- In the first scene after the end of the catastrophe you can see a date, which suggests that a calendar began on December 20, 2012. One of such calendar actually exists.
- In the list of the world's most successful films of all time, 2012 currently ranks 93rd (as of August 8, 2020).
Web links
- 2012 in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- 2012 in the online film database
- 2012 at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Official German website for the film
- Doomsday 2012: Questions and Answers on ScienceBlogs
- 7-minute "Making Of" from 2012 (German)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b 2012 in the Lexicon of International Films . Retrieved February 7, 2013
- ↑ Release certificate for 2012 . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , October 2009 (PDF; test number: 120 226 K).
- ↑ Age rating for 2012 . Youth Media Commission .
- ↑ Box-Office box office results for "2012" by Roland Emmerich
- ↑ 2012. In: synchronkartei.de. German synchronous index , accessed on December 29, 2017 .
- ↑ Studios vie for Emmerich's '2012' ( Memento from April 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Evelyn Roll: Kino: 2012: Undignified Submission . In: sueddeutsche.de . May 17, 2010, ISSN 0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed January 18, 2016]).
- ↑ Article in the Tagesspiegel
- ↑ Interview in the Kölner Stadtanzeiger
- ↑ Undignified Submission , Süddeutsche, November 16, 2009
- ↑ http://www.firedbydesign.com/page-for-the-revelation-category/worldbuster-creating-2012
- ↑ For "2012" the underground tunnel will be flooded
- ↑ http://www.kino.de/kinofilm/2012/111717.html , from November 10, 2009
-
↑ Todd McCarthy: 2012 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Variety, November 9th, 2009.
(Original: This simultaneously spectacular and risible concoction looks likely to trigger a worldwide BO tsunami for Sony. […] Except for some patchy work when St. Peter's crumbles, the visual effects are pretty sensational, delivering the cutting-edge CGI goods auds want and expect. ) - ↑ Criticism on Cinema.de
- ↑ Georg Seeßlen: The destroyer . DIE ZEIT, 12 November 2009, p. 50
- ↑ NASA chooses Roland Emmerich's "2012" as the most absurd sci-fi film
- ↑ NASA - FAQ: 2012: Beginning of the End or Why the World Won't End? (NASA answers questions about the film from a scientific point of view)
- ↑ Primetime check: Sunday, January 8, 2012
- ↑ Top Lifetime big things. Box Office Mojo, accessed August 8, 2020 .
