** Please note that this does contain spoilers but it's necessary to encourage you not to pay to see this movie **
My wife and I saw 2012 last weekend. I was really looking forward to seeing this film after I saw the trailer because I am a huge fan of end of the world and apocalyptic films. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's how I was raised to believe the rapture was going to happen in the late 80s or maybe the early 90s and then the world would end right after the tribulation before the year 2000. I found that a majority of Christians like spending their time thinking about when and how the world will end.
I have to admit that these disaster flicks are fun to watch but I wouldn't consider them great movies. You have to be prepared to accept a high level of bad dialog, acting, and story lines. Movies like Deep Impact, Armageddon, and Day After Tomorrow are good examples of this. However, 2012 puts them all to shame. One of the things that I was most disappointed about was the lack of historical and scientific background of the premise of the film: The world was ending in 2012 because the sun changed and the Mayan calendar predicted it. First, why was the world ending? In the movie, the sun started to emit neutrinos that for some reason started to heat the earth's core and destory the earth's mantle. What caused these neutrinos? The movie didn't say. I am assuming that this was caused by a particular alignment in our galaxy which the Mayan calendar predicted would happen in 2012. That's a big assumption on my part because the movie doesn't give me much to work with. This leads me to my second disappointment. There was no background given on the Mayans and their culture, technology, and how their calendar works. The movie had one 15 second clip of a news report of a group of believers who killed themselves around a Mayan temple because they thought the world was ending. The Mayans were a pretty advanced civilization for their time. They had their own writing and mathematical systems. They were also very advanced in architecture and engineering. They might have been the first astronomers. They demonstrated this by creating a calender that was based on their observations of the visible galaxy.
My last disappointment was at the end of the film where it turns out that the movie is just the story of Noah's Ark 2. In the trailer you see people walking into huge ships that look like space ships. When I first saw that I was excited by the idea because I thought the film would totally destroy the earth by ripping it apart and then the space ships would float out into space in search of a new home. That's not how it turned out. Instead, the end of the world was brought about by a series of huge earthquakes around the planet that caused tidal waves which swept over the continents and covered the earth in water just like in Noah's flood. So the ships were used as arks to keep everyone safe until the waters receded. They even called them arks in the film. So enough of the disappointment that was 2012. The world is not ending in 2012. The Mayan calendar actually doesn't end at 2012. 2012 just starts a new calendar cycle. Instead how about some real science to answer the question of when the world will end.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the closet known galaxy to our galaxy. Scientist have confirmed that it is slowly approaching and is on a collision course for our galaxy. Astronomers have seen this type of event occur in other galaxies and the result is the galaxies are merged or one takes over another. When this happens you can assume that the earth will be ripped apart. Don't worry this won't happen anytime soon. Scientist estimate that it won't happen for another 5 billion years. Who knows, the human race probably won't be around by then. Either we will have depleted the earth's resources and had to leave the planet, another giant asteroid similar to the one that exterminated the dinosaurs could hit earth again, or a virus could overtake the earth and kill everyone. It's not all doom and gloom though. The philosopher Daniel Dennett put it nicely when he said "The planet has grown its own nervous system: us". So if a huge earth ending event happens in the future then hopefully we will have the technology and the means to stop it.
