Hacker Cinema
2012
2009 · Film · 158 min
Directed by Roland Emmerich
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
Dr. Adrian Helmsley, part of a worldwide geophysical team investigating the effect on the earth of radiation from unprecedented solar storms, learns that the earth's core is heating up. He warns U.S. President Thomas Wilson that the crust of the earth is becoming unstable and that without proper preparations for saving a fraction of the world's population, the entire race is doomed. Meanwhile, writer Jackson Curtis stumbles on the same information. While the world's leaders race to build "arks" to escape the impending cataclysm, Curtis struggles to find a way to save his family. Meanwhile, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes of unprecedented strength wreak havoc around the world.
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33 comments on Hacker News
Jesus Christ, dude. That was a disaster movie by the same guy that brought us Independence Day and 2012, based on a book by a radio host best known for possibly facilitating the Heaven's Gate mass suicide by feeding rumors a UFO was following the Hale-Bopp comet, and a writer who has peddled personal tales of alien abductions for 40 years. Not exactly a reliable central tendency measure of what real people feared.
This has to be one of the stupidest false equivalences I've ever seen.
That reminds me of the movie "2012" where they try to flee in a car (Bentley?) and nobody knows how to turn it on and everyone panics. Suddenly, someone from behind says they should all shut up and says "Start the motor".
Movie 2012 already kind of did it. Showed Yellowstone erupting.
But, not by a nuke. Guess that would be new plot.
People were convinced 2012 would be the end of things because of the Mayan calendar. Roland Emmerich even made a movie about it.
Thats very nice of you good ser.
You seem to under the impression that our options are harmonious utopia vs 2012 (movie) whereas I'm of the believe our options are Mad Max vs passing down a few large scale issues to thriving civilisation.
I would much rather live in a world where small chunks of the world is under water and we (a thriving civilisation) have a few ongoing massive issues to fix compared to a world with extreme instability and asymmetry with civil wars, resource wars etc.
Side note on empathy: I believe empathy & good intentions are the most destructive forces in the universe (after sugar ofc). More people have been killed by empathy & good intentions than by the hitlers of this world. Pure evil is extremely unstable but add in empathy and good intentions...
1. USSR banned genetics because you know.. communism
2. Then this guy came up with marxist biology (Lysenkoism) which rejects genetics and scientific agriculture in favour of Lamarckism and then they do this "transition".
3. Turns out the guy was wrong, the "transition" resulted in over 50 million people ded.
4 Then this chinese guy called Mao had a somewhat similar idea of a "transition", he called it the Great Leap Forward.
5. I wont bore you with the details but the punch line is 20-50 million people ded.
The picture I'm trying paint is the tech isn't ready. The infrastructure isn't ready. To implement the "transition" you guys want within the next 10 - 20 years can only be done one way and I've seen that movie before (well read about it anyway).
Isn't this the plot to the movie 2012?
> I really don't understand this American attitude
Just movie is coming... Remember 2012 ? Same. Money.
Thankfully we didn’t build those boats like the 2012 movie
I have a facination with disaster movies. 2012 and The Day after tomorrow are other faves of mine. The holy grail of those movies for me though is Children of Men.
Trash disaster movies have their place, 2012, Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Moonfall, etc. They are all entertaining in their own right, and are usually very self-aware of how stupid they are. Ben Affleck's commentary on Armageddon is gold. Though, I think that film was a higher tier than most of the list here, the Aerosmith song made for that film dominated the summer radio that year and the soundtrack flew off the shelves. I wish things like that still happened, you'll get a bump on Spotify but its cultural impact is much less.
The amazing part is they hash "no" work as proof of work to get rewarded with digital coin that contribute to global warming hastening "2012 movie" and we celebrate it as a monumental achievement! Maybe Thanos is right.
No need for special things like "conspiracy theory". Can be just prelude to some soon in cinemas movie :> Like "2012" and Earth doing scary things.
But yea - govs are well known for doing many stupid thinghs.
And yet protagonists survive after going through a pyroclastic flow routinely in the movies, such as Jurassic World: FK and 2012. It is a recurring trope in movies!
I’m more concerned with the economic realities and the political changes that happen (see: Andrew Yang’s thesis for why our current POTUS was elected) prior to coming up with solutions and that our global power structure is not necessarily good for human progress long term. None of our predictions about technology matters if we hurtle ourselves into another world war that wipes out major areas that concentrate the vast majority of technologists and a second Dark Age occurs as religion and bigotry triumph over reason and tolerance - all because we create technology that must benefit the already-wealthy by design.
Much like the really facile conflict in the movie 2012, will all those 100 million be white and Asian winners of capitalism?
Lastly, human sexuality is super complicated and even with mass-produced customizable porn I’d expect a trend back to imperfect, flawed relationships like we have now eventually. I still see zero answers to what the female equivalent of porn is, so I don’t think every developed country will turn into a mirror of Japan (women may choose to emigrate to find love / purpose similar to how most single men tend to emigrate for economic reasons from developing countries). Most of the West is so culturally obsessed with sex and most Judeochristian religions dogmatically encouraging population growth I don’t see it being possible without a Dark Age of the world happening... which global war could indeed cause.
"shift of the earth's crust"
So the movie 2012 was based on existing daft ideas or did they get those ideas from the movie?
We are still not there. Press pause button on a CGI heavy movie like "2012". The effects work if they are in motion. But looking at them in "pause mode" on 1080p it looks like shit hits the fan. The same for Transformer movies. 90% is real world material with green screen background CGI effects. There are still way too many physical effects going on. And many directors went back to do more physical stunts, because the end CGI-only result was easily spotted and universally hated by the audience.
Jurassic Park 1993 had only 18 minutes of dinosaur screen footage of - 95% of them were miniatures, costumes and hydraulic mechanical robots. Only a very short T-Rex running sequence was rendered with CGI with the predecessor of OpenGL rendered on Silicon Graphics hardware. The good thing is, even today the movie (shot in analog) can be viewed in 2k or even 4k. They will have to re-render "2012" and the Transformer movies for 4k and 8k in near future.
Also the real time rendering is behind, video games still can't render 2005 era movie quality in real time, let alone 2017 era quality.
So a bit pre-mature to call it "goodbye". The progress is great, but there is a road ahead for sure.
So the 2012 (the movie) way of solving environmental problems: The cities can drown as long as we don't belong to the people who drown with it.
> If the rank is lower on Fandango and higher on Rotten Tomatoes, it's usually a bit too artsy and pretentious for me (I go watch a movie to be entertained, not to stoke my ego).
Crass anti-intellectualism.
I like the Sundance Festival, Movies from all over the world and wouldn't got see 2012 on screen but I don't go pissing online on fans of Transformers.
Your definition of `artsy and pretentious' is just `things I don't like'.
The author might be mistaken. I think there's a pretty chance this is simply a demographical difference between the sites' visitors, and I'm pretty disappointed this wasn't brought up early on.
Rotten Tomatoes is a hipstometer (if you don't believe me, look at the artsy film festival movies that rank highest there, or read some of the pedantic reviews). Fandango is what a lot of the RT fans would call a "low brow" venue. More Hollywood-ish (huge budget, unrealistic, etc.) movies (transformers, 2012, The Fast & The Furious, etc.) rank well on fandango, but not on Rotten Tomatoes. The really great movies rank well on both (e.g., Captain Philips, Life of Pi, etc.).
It's always been this way. I use a specific formula of Fandango, iTunes and Rotten Tomatoes scores to decide on a movie. If Fandango ranks it 4-5 stars and Rotten Tomatoes ranks it 50-70%, it's usually really good. If the rank is lower on Fandango and higher on Rotten Tomatoes, it's usually a bit too artsy and pretentious for me (I go watch a movie to be entertained, not to stoke my ego).
"[O]therwise you can kiss anything but the most trite (read: cheap to produce) pop music and plotless explosion-fest movies goodbye."
I'm not sure pop music is cheap to produce (compare the tech work and marketing and all involved in a band playing at your local venue with that at a ... um... Taylor Swift? is she still a pop star? concert), and "plotless explosion-fest movies" tend to be the most expensive movies - "2012" and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" each cost 13 times as much as "The King's Speech".
"If people can't get paid to pursue their dreams, they have to shelve their dreams in order to get paid. Then you have one less author, one less musician, one less movie being made."
Most authors and musicians already do something else in order to get paid.
'Nuclear power plants "want" to melt down, dams "want" to break, influenza "wants" to spread, etc.'
When those things happen, hundreds or thousands or millions of people are harmed. When information spreads, hundreds or thousands or millions of people are enriched. We should find another way of rewarding artists than fighting an uphill battle to constrain value.
I had bought some songs on Sony's old "Connect" (iTunes clone) music store which uses DRM. It shut down and basically said the only way to keep enjoying all the music I bought was to burn all the tracks onto CD and then rip the CD back into MP3 format. (This degrades quality btw)
Rhapsody, another DRM music service had a weird glitch where the few songs I purchased became "disconnected" from my account and no longer played. They were just music files sitting there doing nothing.
MSN Music did the same. Google Video went down as well.
I bought "2012" on Amazon's video on demand store via Unboxed (which is terrible btw). My family night was ruined. The DRM was so invasive to prevent stream stealing that the movie got glitched midway, would pause and never unpause, would not skip forward, and disappeared from my account after upgrading the amazon player. After 2 repurchases and 2 refunds, I just pirated it. The pirated version played great, but the family already got bored and went off to do their own things.
Pirates pirate to avoid money -> customers pay because it's easier -> companies use DRM to punish pirates -> customers end up getting hurt in the cross-fire -> DRM makes pirating the better option for both pirates and customers(former).
DRM isn't a stupid idea, it's a stupid execution of a reasonable idea. Steam's DRM is reasonable. The damage to the name however, is already done. Now I avoid DRM like the plague.
That is what the article argues or at least that they are similar in concept. Since the painting is from the romantic era it could suggest that the studios have adopted a the concept because of the recession. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie industry has trend forecasting like many other industries.
On the other hand it might just be that they are teaser poster. If we are really going for similarity the poster for 2012 is a pretty good fit[0]. Of course I'm not sure if you actually had anything to add or just wanted a Seinfeld moment?
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190080/
Wouldnt this break a movie like 2012?
#2 remove year and stuff following it filename = re.sub('\d\d\d\d.*', ' ', filename)
Oh ok, I see that when I look at the previous version in the article history; it looks like it was fixed 30 mins ago though: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2012_(film)&diff=466686468&oldid=466351744
I'm missing what the mistake is, I think. Though in any case the article's talk page might be a better place to bring it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2012_(film)
OMG! This feels like 2012 (the movie). Seeing that tsunami is breathtaking. I sincerely hope lives aren't lost.
The weather effects in The Day After Tomorrow were ripped off from the 1979 novel The Sixth Winter by Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin. Specifically, the super-cold storm centers were an "expanded for video" version of the "Ice Dancer" storms from the novel; they are unique enough in my rather extensive reading that I noticed the similarity immediately. (For that matter, the same director's later movie, 2012, borrowed rather strongly from Don Pendleton's 1969 novel Cataclysm, though from the credits that may have been indirectly.)
I loved Avatar, but I've noticed a strong theme from Hollywood for over a decade now of environmentalism. It's either the subtext, subplot in the 90's movies, and now it's become the main context and plot of major movies in the 00's and I'm getting the strong feeling I'm going to be beaten to death with it in the 10's.
I think one of the reasons I've gone from liking the Harry Potter film series to outright loving it is because environmentalism isn't even a sub-subtext in the story. The plot is that humans are doing incredible damage to humans, not that humanities inactions are inevitably going to hurt us by some bullshit catastrophe like 2012 or the day after tomorrow.
This bullshit enviro-paganism has driven me to the point of not giving the slightest damn anymore. If you tell me we've got a program error from monday to friday, but you offer no solution to fix it except to spell check the code (recycling) then I'll tell you to fuck off by the next monday. If you offered a major rewrite I'd buy in. Double-down on Fusion research, go all nuclear with new power plants (it's the only practical and realistic way, if you deny it you're ignorant of the massive wastes inherent in solar and wind systems and the fact that many of these systems rely on the existing coal and gas infrastructure to support it in low-wind or cloudy periods).
We're being told we've changed the world disastrously through our inactions, then we should be showing the world we can change it through our actions. Sequester carbon, go nucelar, build a frigging IR reflector in space, build cloud machines.
I find it more disturbing that environmentalists are flat out ignoring the disastrous effects caused by wind turbines, killing bird and especially bat populations and promoting demineralization of farm land (note this is the preliminary step in desertification). Not to mention that there's already been noticeable wind-speed decreases in areas of heavy wind turbine usage. I think interfering with the wind patterns is going to fuck up the planet far more than a little CO2 as you'll actually be creating high and low pressure regions permanently.
So, I don't want to be a whacko or anything, but... this is the plot of 2012, the movie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_(film)#Plot
In the film, solar flares and sunspot activity are blamed for altering radioactivity levels in the earth's core, causing it to rise and the earth's crust to melt, leading to worldwide, CGI-friendly apocalypse.
The thing is, in 2009, when 2012 was filmed, nobody knew there was any linkage at all between sunspots and radioactivity. We thought the rate of decay was constant, and the science behind the film was bullshit. These guys hadn't published yet -- correct me if I'm wrong.
Now it's still obviously bullshit -- the change caused by sunspot activity is not nearly big enough to affect the planet's temperature materially -- but there is a linkage.
Which is, y'know, weird.
C'mon.. don't you know about 2012? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190080/
I would build a giant Ark to save us all from 2012 apocalypse, unlike Roland Emmerich who had saved, few of us in his f*ing movie ;)
I agree to some point, but quality can have an effect. I remember buying cotton swabs in France that were amazing quality (there were none with bare ends, they were rigid enough to actually swab and they came in a convenient container), however ones I bought from Walmart for the same price (converted, not face value) were god awful in quality (easily 5% were bare ended, they were made of the cheapest thinnest plastic tubes that were less rigid than a bendy straw and couldn't swab at all and came in a cheap plastic bag).
I suppose these aren't the things usually purchased online though.
Having actually worked as a video game/movie reviewer, I've rarely bought or seen a movie that I knew I wouldn't like. I'm even cunning enough to get out of having to go see chick flicks with my wife (most of the time, but that doesn't spare me from rentals and TV runs). However, I believe from being immersed so much for several years I've got the ability to see through market hype and know before hand what's going to suck, for instance I'm already trying to find a way to avoid seeing 2012.
I wholly disagree for video games, but then I worked as a reviewer so I admit my view is likely very skewed from the average consumer. Near identical games come out sometimes months apart in video games, but similar happens in the film industry with Armageddon appearing 2 months after Deep Impact in cinemas in '98.
The new Harry Potter was held off last year because the produces were afraid two competing fantasy series could kill each other near a Christmas recession. Twilight, which is basically swept up in the box office and with Harry Potter 6 due out literally like a week later and cost almost 7 times as much to make.
However cooincidences occur frequently with movies and games due to waiting for the right market attention. I mean a G.I. Joe movie or Transformers movie could have been made whenever, similar with a lot of movies, however it's been impossible up until late to make live action movies with quality animation.
I personally see little difference between a lot of video games and movies. I'm uninterested in 2012, because I already saw it with Knowing and its about as meaningful as a movie on the millennium bug would have been in 1997. Then there's the whole Bedtime Stories following Inkheart (Which was due out in March 2008, but was pulled back to December 12 at least in the UK), and Bedtime Stories looked like it was rushed into production following the sale of Inkhearts rights.
Again, I'm probably not the best person to ask as I had a movie pass at like 13 (the pass cost $20 a month, I easily got $40 worth of movies per weekend). So I'll say there is a need for hype in the movie and video game industry, however I still believe there's a big opportunity for companies to rush poor quality movies into production to steal the limelight from another. This is especially true when some movies can take 3 years to produce and others are done and finished in 9 months and may wait another 6 months for release, but if you group movies too closely you end up with two distinct groups of movies (like plays) Comedy or Tragedy and then all grouping is meaningless.