Blu Ray Screencaps from 2012.
I think Roland Emmerich enjoys destruction, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and Godzilla featured major destruction and now with 2012 he continues the theme of landmarks, cities and property being destroyed on a massive scale.
This film centres around the end of the Mayan calendar on the 21st of December 2012 in which the doomsayers would tell you the end of the world will happen, of course the Mayan calendar does indeed end but it actually starts right back up again.
The film features John Cusack as a man separated from his wife and young children who stumbles across the secret that the end of the world is nigh thanks to a wacky turn by Woody Harrelson, goverments around the world have been building huge arks that will save the selected few, at this point Cusack attempts to escape the impending destruction with his family and wife's new boyfriend in tow and their hope is to reach one of the arks and save themselves. Cue buildings collapsing, volcano's exploding and tsunami's a mile high that take out entire cities.
I enjoyed the first part of the film but the more it went on the more i became bored with the relentless destruction, the characters felt a little empty to me and i like John Cusack and Amanda Peet who both starred together in an altogether better film called Identity many years ago.
The end didn't come soon enough although i will not spoil what happens for anyone by revealing anymore, i thought the music score was not that memorable and the end song excrutiating.
The transfer could have been better, there were numerous compression artifacts throughout the movie, you can check out a few below in frames 23 and 24, the noticeable issues seemed to affect the image during the night scenes in dark backgrounds or when people wore dark suits, i'm not sure if the problems existed on the digital intermediate or are because of the Panavision Genesis camera system they used but whatever the case may be the issues should not be there.
I also felt the sound mix was lacking at times, sure there was some good split surround activity and speech through the centre channel was clear, the bass is where i felt the soundtrack had problems, the bass was loud and deep but it didn't move the air the way the best sound mixes do, as an example there was one scene when the Vatican falls which had a tremendous bassy moment which moved the air in the room and i felt it, other scenes where i expected the air to move just sounded much the same, the volcano raining down missiles of hot lava and earth into the ground as John Cusack makes his way down the mountain to the plane had lots of great rear split surround sound but the bass didn't make the impact and move the air the way i felt it should have, it just lacked that extra bit of oomph that the best movie soundtracks have.
I thought about the medium issues list for this movie as the compression artifacts exist all the way through the movie but i decided instead to put it on the minor issues list here.
View blu ray screencaps of 2012 below. Double click for the full HD image.
You might like to view some blu ray screencaps of Godzilla here.
