2012, dir. Emmerich (2009)

2012, dir. Roland Emmerich, Columbia Pictures. Starring John Cusack, Amanda Peek, Chiwetel Ejiofor (2009).

Reviewed by The Exploding Boy

2012 is directed by Roland Emmerich, the same guy who brought us Stargate, Godzilla, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. All monumentally successful movies, bringing high-tech effects and epic storylines to the silver screen—but nothing that compares to the monstrous overkill that is 2012, a movie that has already cleaned up at the US box office. Internationally, reviews have ranged from mixed to negative.

The basic premise of the film stems from the myth of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, which apparently predicts the End of the World on December 21st 2012. Emmerich focuses on the imagined horror of this event in order to shape his disaster movie, a movie that US critics have already hailed as ‘the mother of all disaster movies’. Due to a solar flare heating up the Earth’s core at an unbelievable rate, the Earth’s crust begins to shift, sparking a worldwide Doomsday Event. The film focuses on several characters as they duck and dive through the ensuing digital chaos in an effort to reach the Himalayas where salvation may or may not wait for them.

In a movie like this, the CGI is the real star, and if you think along the lines of Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow and Deep Impact, all turned up to 10, you’ll have already seen this movie. Here Emmerich goes all out, and it’s hard not to feel awed as you watch California slide into the sea or tidal waves decimate Washington. The action, as usual, centres mainly on the US, with a few token acknowledgements along the way that other countries actually exist, in the form of India and China (and a very stereotypical Britain, complete with Queen and corgis—you almost feel patted on the head).

The destruction is, admittedly, stunning, but sadly the only strength of this film. The human drama just can’t compete, as you eagerly await the next sensational catastrophe. As you’d expect, the script is little more than a series of clichés, delivered by clichéd actors reprising the roles of other clichéd actors in other clichéd disaster films (there are, naturally, the obligatory cute kids). But if you can put all that aside and focus on the unfolding mayhem, you might prise a little sadistic enjoyment from this movie. You won’t find many thrills in the acting, that’s for sure—John Cusack is John Cusack, Danny Glover is Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson is Woody Harrelson etc. etc.—or in the saccharine-drenched moralising about humanity, compassion, self-sacrifice etc. etc.—all the things that the US government are so adept at practising in real life (ahem).

As in Independence Day, Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow, if it wasn’t for the States, we’d all be doomed. To be fair, there is a thread in the film that shows governmental wrongdoing by the good ole US of A, but all the speech making and ‘one-for-all’ posturing by the good ole American president (Glover) quickly swamps it. I guess that’s the most fantastical thing about 2012. Despite the fact that in real life the United States pillage the Earth’s resources more than any other country and are currently involved in an illegal war, Emmerich portrays the US here as the paragon of human achievement, decency and our only hope of salvation. Ok, so it’s only a film, but it still grates. Gauche is the word.

In summary, 2012 is a big dumbass action movie. I winced at the Bentley advert slapped right bang in the middle of one OTT scene (and it’s OTT all the way here—subtlety took a rain check). Product placement aside, it’s one of those films where you can play ‘follow the stereotype’ and guess who’s going to cop it next with zero difficulty, where the characters have the emotional range of a small tree and the plot holes gape almost as wide as the snaking cracks in the pavement. It’s popcorn, it’s ‘fun’, it’s done. The preposterous leap into sci-fi towards the end of the movie almost goes unnoticed, the production is so overwhelming. The veiled Biblical message comes over as laughable. America vies for cinematic sainthood yet again. Think Noah’s Ark and you’re on the right track.

With the scale of the destruction, one can only guess where filmmakers will go to next. There doesn’t seem much ground left to cover unless an imploding universe movie is on the cards. One thing’s for sure, as I watched the seas rise and continents shift, I couldn’t help but wonder that if this really was the End of the World—Hollywood style—why I wasn’t more sorry to see it go.

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Grimwood, Exaggerated Man (2008)

Terry Grimwood, The Exaggerated Man and other stories. Exaggerated Press, 2008. Pp. 237. 9780955852206. £6.95 / $12.61.

Reviewed by Louisa Thomson

Terry Grimwood’s self-published, powerful collection of nineteen short stories (all previously published elsewhere) blazes with confidence. Guilt, retribution, sex and money are all magnified under Grimwood’s lens and evil—both ancient and new—glints in his darkness. A wallet holds the key to our soul’s secrets, a pastor’s journey to heaven becomes the gory reality of life after death and a nightmarish ruling, mired in political correctness finds Death Doctors stealing bodies from the LiveScum so the immortal dead can feast on the vulnerable living. These are dystopian predictions and cautionary tales of moral and social ineptitude where technological advancements have forgotten the innate instincts of human nature and money has become a currency of greed and fear rather than pounds, shillings and pence.

A thread of perceived weakness links Grimwood’s main cast; often unable to speak their truth before it’s too late, incapable of stepping up to their responsibilities honestly, and powerless to resist the women of their downfall. But they provide strong foils for the underlying messages even if they themselves don’t always feel sustainable as stand-alone characters. The language is taut, generally well-edited and captures a variety of colloquial accent—from New Yawk drawl (in ‘The Friends of Mike Santini’) to the extraordinary half Dickens, half Alex DeLarge diction of London’s Bull Poor in ‘Nobody Walks In London’.

‘Breathe’ is a gem of a tale, calling to mind shades of Zamyatin’s We. The relentless march of progress over nature is removing all human biological functions and prostitutes are earning their crust by breathing into artificially modified clients. Social divide is represented by the choice to be a Breather (to live the old-fashioned way, sucking oxygen into human lungs) or a FullPerson (artificially respiring)—and the choice presented to Marko Denna is blurred by love, pressure and instinct. I defy anyone to read ‘Breathe’ and not find themselves dragging in delicious gulps of lovely, polluted air with a secret pang of relief. But oh, I wanted a novel of this, not a short story! There’s so much juice to unearth, so many interesting layers to investigate.

And beauty shines out of the titular story, ‘The Exaggerated Man’ (although I don’t want to tell you about it, I want you to read it for yourself). Something in the easy flow of Grimwood’s language, the clarity of his descriptions and the strong emotional tug suggest a vision closer to the author than fiction. I kept wondering what it could have been… a dream, or maybe shades of a private truth? This and ‘The Lowestoft Monster’ are two stories that, despite the pain of their subjects, truly stir the heart. ‘The Lowestoft Monster’ infers an ambiguous evil of our own choosing, never defined beyond recollections of words and moments and thus inflated to even more terrifying proportions when you realize the narrator himself is too scared to directly verbalize the image. We’re left to draw our conclusions, thus ensuring we’ll employ our own, individual perception of horror to fill the shoes of the dreaded Uncle Sidney with his seemingly innocuous stance and words.

Sadly, a couple of the shorter pieces failed to catch my imagination with the same force of ‘Breathe’. In contrast to the depth and texture elsewhere, ‘Dirty Stop-Out’ reads as no more than a wisp of an idea based on a punchline. I was left similarly cold by ‘Freedom’.

The disparate locations in both time and place across the breadth of the collection should feel unsettling but are saved by the consistency of Grimwood’s themes. Greed, suffocation and loss provide a strong heart beat. Suffocation comes in the form of mounting debts, social pressure and the more literal inability to breathe naturally. Men are confronting the systems that control them but losing out every time to the monster wielding ultimate power. These monsters are often lurking on the breeze or far off in dark shadows. They’re hiding beneath a veneer of public respectability or perhaps in the minds of their victim.

While I never tired of the book I would suggest a careful approach. Grimwood chivvies us from Mars to London, the seaside and back like a demented sight-seeing bus behind schedule. Such pulls are occasionally jarring—mental leaping requires a flexible imagination—so these are stories to be taken as individual treats. Lose yourself in the torment of the youth-slaughtering flu in ‘Coffin Road’ or the horrific bargain on offer in ‘Atoner’, but then step away, enjoy the lingering sensation for as long as your imagination will sustain the trip, then dive back in for a totally different experience.

My enjoyment of The Exaggerated Man and Other Stories urges me to leave the review at that—enjoyment. But Terry Grimwood doesn’t write stories without a sting in the tail so I must also be tempered by my less-pleasing thoughts...

Grimwood’s boundless imagination paints future worlds with prescient, disturbing skill but the most disturbing element is his inability to see women as much more than sirens, whores or weaklings. And this lazy gender stereotyping of the SF audience is as out of date as the ‘geeky’ perception of the genre as a whole.

The representation of women within this collection reveals an embarrassingly simplistic view of the roles of the sexes. Prostitutes are girls, winos are men. Men fall for foxy young mistresses with husky voices and beer-drinking ways while their dry, sneering wives read dull novels, and keep the house too clean. Women need trinkets to make them happy and men have to provide, even if that means selling their souls in the bargain.

In ‘The Exaggerated Man’, having touched death, Atwood begins to see life in horrifying, exaggerated detail. But it’s the women he encounters that become the most grotesque: ‘She was...dirty. Scraps of make-up clung to her face, her pores leaked fluids, her flesh was ingrained with muck of all kinds. She stank of sweat, semen, of other juices and excretions.’

Then it’s Avril’s intoxicating lure that leads Paul Wilde into trouble with the tough and demonic Mike Santini. In ‘Coffin Dream’ it’s Sarah’s breakdown that drags Tony into his life-threatening debts. In ‘Breathe’, Marko Denna endures the effects of surgical reformation to appease his nagging, violent wife, Karryann. In ‘John’, Cathy can’t resist the charms of her now-dead husband despite his violent and abusive history. In fact, she’s so weak-willed, even the realization that he’s become the devil isn’t enough: ‘She felt her selfsame pussy grow warm, despite the numbing shock. Despite disappointment which bordered on despair.’

Fat women are outcasts (Melissa) or cackling clowns (Diana), wives nag their long-suffering husbands, and beauty wreaks hellish, murderous havoc when a woman’s jealousy comes to town. Bosses’ daughters can be handy tickets to promotion and, in the rare case of being a ‘very powerful Erasman lady’ this lady in question is represented by the black mass of an enormous, hideous spider living for nothing but to breed and kill.

This veiled misogyny didn’t stop me enjoying the book but I certainly felt a tinge of detachment. It’s hard to engage when you’re clearly not the chosen audience—and that’s a shame. I’m not looking for a PC whitewash—just a writer as willing to flex his muscles against stereotypes as he is against the laws of earthly physics.

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