Hurray! Doomsday has arrived!!!

Sometimes , it is pretty funny how people react to stuff. Now, I am not suggesting that its bad to react in that way. Just that, it seems strange...

I watched 2012, the recent film based on the year the world would come to an end, as predicted by the Mayans centuries ago... Roland Emmerich seems to have stuck to a way of making films and that way is centered around 'Hope'. Proof? Every other film, he makes the protagonist(s) and his group suffer and reach a point of saturation where there seems absolutely no way out, after which he provides this glimmer of an opportunity to work a way out of the problem... We saw that in Independence Day, when Will Smith and Goldblum, squeezed their way out of the MotherShip through a gap which looked barely enough to let a fly pass by (in relative terms that is)... in Day After Tommorow, when a blizzard storm almost hit Jake Gylenhall and his friends as they slam the library's door where they take refuge... In Godzilla and other films too...

Now, 2012 is no different. It is rather, on the same lines almost as Day After Tommorow, except for the fact that here it is due to some energy reaction, instead of Global Warming... The breathtaking CGI graphics (Computer Generated Imagery), is something worth watching on the big screen, and those situations where the star cast miss, or rather, KISS, death and escape from it calls for roaring applauses, hoots and whistles from the crowds!

Emmerich makes the crumbling of buildings, roads, mountains etc, look like a thin wafer of potato chip breaking apart in smithereens due to excessive vibration! True, as he is dealing with nature forces. There are scenes in the film where one would probably get reminded of people like Sooraj Barjatya, such as when the geologist talks to his dad over the phone and so on... But, in the end, it all adds up, as you keep reminding yourself that it was the END OF THE WORLD, and one had the license to break down emotionally in such circumstances!!!

Cast performances, there is nothing much to comment on as Cusack dominates the screen space for most of the time, and hey, I found Gordon (dunno his real name!), the handy pilot, heroic too!

The background scores seem strikingly similar to Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow. Guess all you need for background music in such catastrophe based films is some high pitched majestic jingle to accompany the mind blowing visuals, such as when you show the Statue of Liberty go down as rubble, or the sea engulf the lands!

There is one aspect which caught me by surprise! The movie has been a blockbuster breaking the records set by Titanic and The Mummy in Chennai. One can witness it in the theaters as well. When the title comes up, namely, 2012, people went berserk, screaming and hooting with joy! I mean, people love the concept of a Doomsday or what!!! The crowd roared with applause and cheers, when one of the actors mentions about a 'tsunami' wave lash the shores across India. That was rather ironical, as Chennai was one of the biggest victims to the killer Tsunami waves in 2004. Is such applause suggestive that the city has braved itself for such calamities in the future, or is it a mere mockery of what happened in the past? Whatever those applauses meant, the crowds in the theaters seemed to have a great time watching such disasters happen (an equivalent for stress relief??? :D)

Of course, scenes where Cusack dies almost, yet survives, to see another day, was inspiring and earned brownie points in my books as well! Not to mention the debate my friend and I got into regarding the issue whether people with only a billion euros could enter the ship so as to survive and the others had to stay out and die...

In short, 2012, a movie about Doomsday takes one to another dimension, where they actually relish the world crumbling into fragments!!! Emmerich and Michael Bay could team up to do a film where Machines destroy Humanity and take over!!! Oh wait! James Cameron already started that with the Terminator saga!!! :D