Two very different movies with numbers in the title
I shall warn you here, I'm posting two full reviews on 2012 and Planet 51. There will be spoilers for those who want to know nothing about either film. If you need to read the short version, check out my Facebook page (Amber Meyer) or my Twitter (wench0565).
THE WORLD GOES TO HELL!
Let's start with 2012. Roland Emmerich is the master of disaster to be sure. The man is responsible for the totally fun "Day After Tomorrow". This is a guilty pleasure of mine and I watch it every time it's on, and I wish I could say 2012 was as fun. It has its moments, but it lacked the tension, and to some extent the heart, that Day After Tomorrow had in abundance.
Essentially, this movie uses the Mayan culture's belief that there would be a planetary change in 2012 (what this entails is a matter of opinion and vastly different interpretations). Emmerich said at Comic-Con that he didn't even know about this at first when he was researching another disaster idea, and he found this on the internet. He integrated it, but only a little to set up the massive chaos that ensues. The planet is in peril. The sun has flared massively due to a planetary alignment, I think, and neutrinos have bathed our home. This is going to cause a cataclysmic shift in all the tectonic plates! MASSIVE WAVES WILL COME, LOW BECOMES HIGH, DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER. I digress.
One of the heroes is played by John Cusack. I dig John Cusack, but he plays the same character a lot; conflicted, nervous, funny. He's no different here. He's a writer and limo driver who has a sketchy relationship with his kids and his ex-wife. We also have our other hero Chiwetel Ejiofor (a Serenity fave of mine) as a scientist who learns about the looming disaster and gets a nice promotion because of it, but he's a good man who thinks people should know things are going to go off the rails very soon. I truly love this guy as an actor and know he's got a lot of new movies in the works, which is very good news for all of us. There's an able supporting cast consisting of Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, and Oliver Platt (among others).
The movie starts in 2009, with Ejiofor finding out we're in trouble from a fellow scientist and alerting the proper folks. It hits its stride in 2012 when all hell starts to break loose. Funny thing, though, no one on our planet is aware that we are in grave danger. In the age of the internet, I find this hard to believe, but oh well. Apparently the world leaders have been working hard on saving a few of us by building something (I won't say what) that will protect them when it all goes bad.
After our heroes cross paths, the fun begins. Cali falls of into the ocean, Yellowstone becomes a lava lamp, Vegas has lost all bets, Hawaii gets a tad warm, and so on, and so on.
I won't go much further except to say it's a race against the clock for Cusack and family, and a moral dilemma for Ejiofor who has to answer to a pinhead boss (that would be Platt). It's about 20-25 minutes too long and does suffer from a gigantic cast. On the good side, the effects are beautiful. I live in Vegas, and watching some Strip icons come tumbling down made me crack up. There were moments of extreme tension, particularly in California, due to the beauty of these effects. You get a sense of hugeness to the destruction as well.
All in all, worth a matinee and a very large popcorn.
CUTENESS WITH A SIDE OF AMUSING!
Next we have Planet 51. One word sums it up: Cute. It's very cute.
Basically it's a fish out of water story (or astronaut out of galaxy story). We open on Planet 51 which is very much like 1950's America but with green aliens. Our hero, Lem (voiced by Justin Long) is a nice kid whose life is on a track he likes. He has a goofy friend, Skiff (Seann William Scott) and a girl next door he's grooving on (Jessica Biel). On this friendly place lands a man from earth, an astronaut from our time, named Chuck Baker (Dwayne Johnson-- The Rock for all you wrestling fans). Chuck is a hunky blowhard, but a nice one, who just wants to get his landing module back so he can go home.
Of course there's the paranoid types who think Chuck wants to take over the planet, and these provide the obstacles needed to teach everyone the lessons they need to learn. It's very cute how they use the 50's to showcase the aliens since this was a very sci-fi heavy time in our history, a time in which invasion movies were quite the rage. This place is no different.
There are numerous references to famous sci-fi movies, but none of them were subtle. They just kind of whacked you over the head. The aliens are all soft edges and gentle colors, very non-threatening. Even the army types weren't that scary, but there's a couple moments of cruelty that surprised me and may send the wrong message to a young one.
It had moments that made me laugh out loud but not as many as I would have liked. I was also paying attention to the kids in the audience as this is the target audience. I heard laughs here and there, but not in large quantities that I've heard in other CG animated features. This is a Tristar pic, and it's a nice effort, but Pixar and Dreamworks do it better. They are careful to get writers who craft humor or drama into a script with more subtlety or more edge to really grab the adult viewer, while putting enough kid laughs in to make a child want to buy every toy associated with the movie. Tristar was close on this one, and it should be a money-maker, but don't expect Shrek-type laughs.
THE WORLD GOES TO HELL!
Let's start with 2012. Roland Emmerich is the master of disaster to be sure. The man is responsible for the totally fun "Day After Tomorrow". This is a guilty pleasure of mine and I watch it every time it's on, and I wish I could say 2012 was as fun. It has its moments, but it lacked the tension, and to some extent the heart, that Day After Tomorrow had in abundance.
Essentially, this movie uses the Mayan culture's belief that there would be a planetary change in 2012 (what this entails is a matter of opinion and vastly different interpretations). Emmerich said at Comic-Con that he didn't even know about this at first when he was researching another disaster idea, and he found this on the internet. He integrated it, but only a little to set up the massive chaos that ensues. The planet is in peril. The sun has flared massively due to a planetary alignment, I think, and neutrinos have bathed our home. This is going to cause a cataclysmic shift in all the tectonic plates! MASSIVE WAVES WILL COME, LOW BECOMES HIGH, DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER. I digress.
One of the heroes is played by John Cusack. I dig John Cusack, but he plays the same character a lot; conflicted, nervous, funny. He's no different here. He's a writer and limo driver who has a sketchy relationship with his kids and his ex-wife. We also have our other hero Chiwetel Ejiofor (a Serenity fave of mine) as a scientist who learns about the looming disaster and gets a nice promotion because of it, but he's a good man who thinks people should know things are going to go off the rails very soon. I truly love this guy as an actor and know he's got a lot of new movies in the works, which is very good news for all of us. There's an able supporting cast consisting of Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, and Oliver Platt (among others).
The movie starts in 2009, with Ejiofor finding out we're in trouble from a fellow scientist and alerting the proper folks. It hits its stride in 2012 when all hell starts to break loose. Funny thing, though, no one on our planet is aware that we are in grave danger. In the age of the internet, I find this hard to believe, but oh well. Apparently the world leaders have been working hard on saving a few of us by building something (I won't say what) that will protect them when it all goes bad.
After our heroes cross paths, the fun begins. Cali falls of into the ocean, Yellowstone becomes a lava lamp, Vegas has lost all bets, Hawaii gets a tad warm, and so on, and so on.
I won't go much further except to say it's a race against the clock for Cusack and family, and a moral dilemma for Ejiofor who has to answer to a pinhead boss (that would be Platt). It's about 20-25 minutes too long and does suffer from a gigantic cast. On the good side, the effects are beautiful. I live in Vegas, and watching some Strip icons come tumbling down made me crack up. There were moments of extreme tension, particularly in California, due to the beauty of these effects. You get a sense of hugeness to the destruction as well.
All in all, worth a matinee and a very large popcorn.
CUTENESS WITH A SIDE OF AMUSING!
Next we have Planet 51. One word sums it up: Cute. It's very cute.
Basically it's a fish out of water story (or astronaut out of galaxy story). We open on Planet 51 which is very much like 1950's America but with green aliens. Our hero, Lem (voiced by Justin Long) is a nice kid whose life is on a track he likes. He has a goofy friend, Skiff (Seann William Scott) and a girl next door he's grooving on (Jessica Biel). On this friendly place lands a man from earth, an astronaut from our time, named Chuck Baker (Dwayne Johnson-- The Rock for all you wrestling fans). Chuck is a hunky blowhard, but a nice one, who just wants to get his landing module back so he can go home.
Of course there's the paranoid types who think Chuck wants to take over the planet, and these provide the obstacles needed to teach everyone the lessons they need to learn. It's very cute how they use the 50's to showcase the aliens since this was a very sci-fi heavy time in our history, a time in which invasion movies were quite the rage. This place is no different.
There are numerous references to famous sci-fi movies, but none of them were subtle. They just kind of whacked you over the head. The aliens are all soft edges and gentle colors, very non-threatening. Even the army types weren't that scary, but there's a couple moments of cruelty that surprised me and may send the wrong message to a young one.
It had moments that made me laugh out loud but not as many as I would have liked. I was also paying attention to the kids in the audience as this is the target audience. I heard laughs here and there, but not in large quantities that I've heard in other CG animated features. This is a Tristar pic, and it's a nice effort, but Pixar and Dreamworks do it better. They are careful to get writers who craft humor or drama into a script with more subtlety or more edge to really grab the adult viewer, while putting enough kid laughs in to make a child want to buy every toy associated with the movie. Tristar was close on this one, and it should be a money-maker, but don't expect Shrek-type laughs.