By now you may have seen or heard of 2012, the movie that is.
I only saw it recently, and only by the grace of KLM’s onboard entertainment system. It is standard fare from the apocalypse genre. The Earth has a cyclical destiny, which involves at crucial points in this cycle a confrontation with some life-wiping monstrosity. In the movie 2012, the choice of monstrosity is also pretty standard fare – a disease in the Earth’s crust, mangling the Earth’s magnetic field, displacing the continents, and necessitating the building of a new Noah-type ark – or rather a number of them.
I was not so much worried about the plausibility of this disaster movie as I was about its fatalist non-consequentialism. There isn’t much we can do about unpredictable Earth-chewing bugs now, is there? To all intents and purposes, whatever moral was in the tale of 2012 can't matter much to the lives of you and me.
I have had another kind of apocalypse in mind these past few weeks. It would make for a most underwhelming disaster movie though, and I have no intent of dramatizing the issue. But as quasi-seismic events in the health of the species go – and the fate of the species and the planet are much conjoined nowadays, are they not? – this one is worth at least a cursory thought.
