Take a break from work: watch a trailer…
Second-by-second reactions:
0:23: “Mayan calendar predicts the end of time”? *snort* And I’ve got an ark on a Middle Eastern mountaintop I’d like to sell you…
0:37: Oh no! Not John Cusack! Johnny, what were you thinking? God, I hope they paid you a shitload of dough for this.
0:55: Well, the Vatican getting destroyed can’t be such a bad thing. Too bad about all the nice art, though…
1:01: “From Roland Emmerich”? No! Really! I’d never have guessed!
1:06: Translation: If you thought ‘Independence Day’ didn’t destroy enough of human civilization…
1:07: We totally wanted Morgan Freeman for our noble black President, but his cinematic term limits are up. </Emmerich>
1:09: Translation: If you thought ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ didn’t trash enough of planet Earth…
1:11: Yeah, we used that last-minute-takeoff-before-the-runway’s-toast bit in ‘ID4,’ too. But it’s soo cool! </Emmerich>
1:18: Seriously, though, how freakin’ awesome is Los Angeles falling into the Pacific. If you don’t wet your pants, we’ll wet ’em for you! </Emmerich>
1:23: “They said that the government is building these ships…” Wait, I thought someone was already remaking When Worlds Collide? (Yup, it’s Stephen Sommers.)
1:36: “Wasn’t it also decided that people have the right to fight for their lives?!” I nominate this already for Worst Line of the Year.
2:15: If you thought the White House getting blown up by aliens was the worst thing that could happen to it…
2:30: “No matter what happens, we’ll all stay together.” Bet they don’t.
2012 opens in the U.S. and the U.K. on November 13. Of 2009, of course. If they waited till 2012, they’d just look silly when the planet’s still fine the next morning.
MaryAnn, your reactions to this trailer, and mine, appear to have been predicted with eerie accuracy.
1:18: Welcome to Arizona Bay. Please make your rent check payable to Bill Hicks.
Why, it’s every disaster picture ever made rolled into one. Now that’s what I call a mashup! [/Groucho]
The oldest civilization, how about the Sumerians for starters? Then there are a load more before you get to the Mayans.
Even if you were to accept the Mayan calendar, the end of the cycle does not mean the end of the Earth to them. It’s simply equivalent to the end of a century. No biggie.
Uncontrollable laughter from watching an aircraft carrier roll over on top of the White House wasn’t the original intention, was it?
How lucky are we to have Bay and Emmerich alive and at their peak in our lifetime? :)
I just thought that when you get to the end of the Mayan calendar you start over from the beginning of the Mayan calendar. You know, sort of like a modern calendar.
JoshDM, shush! Talking that kind of sense, you could destroy an entire industry of disaster porn, conspiracy theories, and other miscellaneous fearmongering.
Yes, in fact, sometime around the current date on the Mayan calendar you can find a series of pictograms that remind you to go to the stonemason and get a new calendar for the next B’ak’tun.
The Fake Trailer is totally awesome though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW2qxFkcLM0&eurl
Wow, that’s…dumb.
Let’s see here.
As has already been mentioned, the Mayans are not the oldest civilization.
They also, as has again already been mentioned, did not predict the end of time, just the end of their calendar.
This end of the calendar was not meant to be a cataclysm of some sort, just a new beginning.
And as I recall hearing somewhere else, all this is caused by a massive fucking meteor smacking the moon and dislodging huge chunks of it that crash into Earth. Certainly none of those were predicted by the Mayans.
Congratulations, sirs! The first line of your trailer is wrong four times.
Not only John Cusack, but Oliver Platt and Chiwetel Ejiofor, both of whom I would have thought had better taste.