Myth in movies: “2012”—Hollywood predicts the world will be destroyed by special effects

Myth in movies: “2012”—Hollywood predicts the world will be destroyed by special effects

Posted on November 16th, 2009 by Marc Oromaner

It was inevitable that this day would come. With the growing knowledge about the Mayan calendar end date of December 21, 2012, it was just a matter of time before Hollywood seized the opportunity to show its version of what the end date could mean. Since worldwide spiritual enlightenment, a slow transition from a patriarchal to matriarchal society, or nearly imperceptible earth-changes are admittedly not the stuff of blockbusters, Hollywood logically opted for a disaster flick. And not just any disaster flick, but a disaster flicks’ greatest hits.

The 2012 experience is pretty much like a roller coaster ride. It begins with a long line outside the theater. Then, you are secured into your seat where you must keep your hands on your half of the armrest at all times. Once the movie begins, you begin your slow ascent. On the way up, the story’s slow pace builds anticipation of the coming frenzy; feeding audiences with frightening scenarios involving peaks in solar flare activity, planetary alignments, crust shifts, and super volcanoes. As prisoners in our seats, forbidden from using iPhones, we are helpless from learning the truth behind these scary statistics and are forced to accept them all as facts. Terrifying.

The film continues its slow climb, click-clacking higher and higher until at last, about thirty minutes into the film, we crest at the summit, fully aware of how high we’ve ascended, and grip onto our armrests in gut-wrenching anticipation of the wild ride ahead. Instead, there’s an eerie silence, almost as though we are being given some time to digest the many ways earth’s selfish inhabitants are finally gonna get what’s coming to them! Knowing we are well aware of the inevitable drop, the filmmakers then psych us out just as some roller coasters do: with a couple of teasing, tiny dips. There’s a tremor here, a pavement crack there. As with the coasters, this enables the big drop of the film to catch us a bit more off-guard.

Suddenly, it happens! We are careening full-speed through a cornucopia of falling freeways, collapsing skyscrapers and exploding pavements. First we are in a car, then a small airplane, then that airplane lands but takes off again, then we’re in a huge jet airplane, then a ship, then another ship! Up and down we roll, speeding through a collection of just about every disaster film ever made: Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Deep Impact, The Day After Tomorrow, Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Airport, Airport 1975, hell, even Airplane!. In fact, you could probably create every single scene of 2012 using just a couple dozen disaster and sci-fi films, and I expect someone is already working on it so they can get their fifteen minutes of YouTube fame. (Should it be you, I recommend using the remake of War of the Worlds for the collapsing freeway scene and Knowing or Sunshine for the solar flares.)

So, how much of this 2012 stuff is fact, and how much is Hollywood? Getting back to the possible scenarios, we begin with the film’s claim that in 2012, our sun’s solar flare activity will reach a peak in activity. Well, according to a recent History Channel special I saw, this is indeed true. But this solar flare activity is cyclical—the sun reaches its peak every eleven years, and having survived through the last peak way back in 2001, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this one in and of itself will not do us in. But there’s the rub—it’s not just the solar flares that will be going on in 2012. According to the movie, Woody Harrelson’s character informs us that there will also be a planetary alignment. I heard myself groan during the film when this was mentioned. No, the planets will not be lining up on December 21st, 2012, nor anytime soon to my knowledge. However, the alignment that will be happening is the position of the sun (as seen from the Earth) and the center of our galaxy. This intersection was affectionately referred to as the “Sacred Tree” by the Maya. Note the usage of the term “sacred” as opposed to say “abominable,” “catastrophic,” or “man-eating.” So, it would seem that this alignment was considered a good thing by the Mayan. Admittedly, the complete annihilation of humanity could’ve been seen by the Maya as a positive occurrence as physical man would finally be passing into the spiritual world, but I’ll just ignore that point for now.

What I probably shouldn’t ignore though, is that according to astronomers, lurking at the center of our galaxy there is a massive black hole. I suppose that the gravitational pull of this black hole could theoretically bring about an increase in the sun’s already peaking solar flare activity as it passes into the black hole’s crosshairs. Thing is, the sun has actually been traipsing within this crosshair region during our Winter Solstice for years now. Had the solar flare activity been getting worse and worse every year, then I think there would be a pretty big argument that there could be something to this. To my knowledge however, the solar flare activity has not significantly increased beyond what astronomers would normally expect as it heads towards its eleven-year cyclical peak.

But what about the shifting of the earth’s crust? While I’m no geologist, and the mandatory requirement for earth science in my school began the year after I had opted not to take it, I believe that massive crust shifting tends not to happen within 24-hour periods (In the film, Wisconsin ends up in the South Pole by the end of the day.) That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t however, or that slower shifts wouldn’t be devastating, just that we probably would be given a bit more of a heads up than the movie seems to imply, something probably akin to a few thousand year heads up. Hmmm, actually, now I’m curious. Instead of being lazy and waiting for a commenter to correct my flawed presumption, I decided to scan the Internet myself and found that it is indeed theoretically possible for the earth crust to slip in a day. Luckily, the point of this article isn’t to disprove the possibility of the various calamities of the film, but that…well, you’ll see.

Finally, there’s the supervolcano eruption possibility. I personally found this to be the most ridiculous aspect of the film, but not because it couldn’t happen. In fact, there actually is a supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park, and geologists have claimed that it appears to be bulging. No, the part I found ridiculous is that one could explode a few feet from you, causing you to be thrown backward, but not injuring you. That you could outrun lava flow and outmaneuver falling chunks of earth. And then there’s the wee little detail that the film kind of glossed over. If volcanoes all over the earth simultaneously exploded, including several super volcanoes, the world would be thrown into a nuclear winter that would wipe out virtually all life…for years if not decades.

Despite the (mostly) ridiculous science of 2012, I actually enjoyed the film. I mean, I knew what I was getting going in and wasn’t expecting any profound revelations. I just wanted to go for a ride. Hollywood is infamous for taking a tiny bit of fact, and blowing it up to enormous proportions. In 2012, it blew up the entire planet, but luckily, the film didn’t take itself too seriously. I mean, if the dramatic storyline regarding a divorced father’s bedwetting young daughter doesn’t bring a smile, then the sight of an airlifted giraffe fully dressed in thermal gear certainly will. The airlifting animals scene, while obviously reminiscent of Noah’s ark, got me thinking about the other couple of movies I’d seen recently featuring the exact same scenario: Knowing and the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Personally, I find Hollywood’s plethora of worldwide disaster films lately to be a bit more telling then the content of any one film. Are Hollywood’s shamanic powers picking up some prophetic storylines from our all-knowing collective unconsciousness, or are they just feeding the fears of a world that already seems to be heading toward its end of days?

Besides the Maya, 2012 also brings up the Native American Hopi tribe as sharing in the 2012 doom saying. From my understanding, the Hopi didn’t specifically choose 2012 as the end of this world, but that this world would end once it was fully encompassed by a web of sorts—a world wide web if you will. This, among their other prophesies all seem to have come true. Surprisingly, I don’t recall the film mentioning Nostradamus as among those who predicted the 2012 end date. What surprised me is not that the famous prophet never mentioned 2012 in any of his quatrains, which he didn’t, but that the film didn’t bring him up anyway.

What the film should’ve brought up, and what I’ve always found to be particularly creepy, is the prophesy of the 12th century archbishop, Saint Malachy. In 1138, Saint Malachy predicted the entire succession of 112 Catholic popes from the pope of his day (Celestinus II) until doomsday. Saint Malachy gave each pope a nickname and so far, while most are pretty vague, they’ve pretty much all panned out. The creepy part is that Malachy foresaw that the world would end under the reign of the 112th pope, and Pope Benedict XVI is the 111th. And the dude is old—82 (Pope John Paul II was 84 when he died). Add horror stinger here.

So if doomsday is upon us, one may wonder if 2012 can offer us any insight into what we might expect. Once again, reading between the lines of the special effects eye candy seems to be more telling. According to the movie, most of the world’s 6.5 billion people meet their end during the global atrocities of 2012. The attitude of the film though is that this loss of 99% of mankind is really no biggie since we haven’t been following the dramatic storylines, i.e., bedwetting daughters, of these people. Only those who appear on film truly matter, and most of them are either really rich or politicians, since they were the only ones who were able to afford, or get a hold of, the ticket to salvation—which, we are told, is one billion Euros.

Of all the flaws and inaccuracies of the film, this is where I feel it made its biggest oversight. I mean, if the sole survivors of a worldwide calamity were to be only the ultra-rich and politicians, humanity would be doomed! These people wouldn’t last a week without their servants, aids, assistants, chefs, and butlers—none of whom were saved! I mean, even if we can look over the whole nuclear winter thing and the fact that there wouldn’t been any vegetation or wildlife left on the planet to eat, how could these highly dependant people be expected to care for themselves, let alone help create a new society?

And that’s when I got to thinking: Hold on, after 2012, only the materially-focused ultra-rich, politicians, and others who managed to cheat their way to safety will be left on earth?? By golly the Christian Fundamentalists are right! Those who die in 2012 will in fact be a part of the Rapture, while those “left behind” will have to suffer through hell on earth! And with no money, material pleasures, servants, maids, aids, chefs, butlers, carpenters, mechanics, go-fers, or day workers available to do all the dirty work, life on earth would be pure hell for the formerly spoiled! In fact, as the movie headed towards it’s conclusion, I hoped that the few good people that were still alive—including, of course, the prophetic writer and his bedwetting daughter—would actually die. We’d then follow their souls to another realm where all the 2012 victims had gathered. Here, we’d learn that the new world that would rise from the old one’s ashes was not on the old earth at all—but in another, more spiritual plane where all life could live a more peaceful and harmonious existence. In fact, according to most spiritualists, Christen Fundamentalists, devout Moslems, and practicing Jews, the next world is beyond the one in which we live. Those who’ve behaved and not done much naughtiness will be whisked away beyond the illusionary veil in a Rapture taking us to a heaven with 72 virgins where the Messiah rules over a new dimension of peace and love.

To my chagrin, 2012 did not end this unexpected and entirely more original way, and therefore, did not really follow the myth in my opinion. They say the meek shall inherit, not the oil barons and politicians. To be fair, I don’t know that the literal interpretations of the religious literature is really there either. After seeing dozens of apocalyptic films, studying kabbalah for several years, learning about 2012 since the mid-nineties, reading many spiritual books, attending countless presentations on related subjects, and writing a 2,000 page as-of-yet unpublished tome that covers much of the future, I have come to this conclusion about what will really happen on 2012: at dawn, a ball of fire will rise into the sky; billions of people will be fearful, billions hopeful, and billions indifferent just as always; there will be devastating calamities all over the world and there will be many-times more positive events mostly drowned out by the negativity just as always; some people will look on at awe at the day’s events—deeply inspired and moved, others will cower in panic—reacting in anger and fear, while others will continue in their life-long stupor—addicted to the news of the day but then quickly forgetting about it just as always. However, because we believe the world can change after 2012, I feel that we have a huge opportunity to make it so. I believe that those who define themselves by what they are rather than what they have will be more likely to usher in this new energy, and help it to spread to those who don’t share their vision.

In short, I think we have the power to create any new world we can imagine, but fear-mongering movies, TV shows, and news reports are pushing us towards the dark side. This is only because these messages are reflective of our current thoughts. Something almost certainly will happen on the Mayan end date, but I believe it’s up to us to decide whether it’ll be positive or negative. So let’s change the world by changing our minds, and envision a world that we’d all love to live in. Instead of relying on Hollywood, let’s create our own special effects for 2012. Something tells me that our version will be more fulfilling anyway.

Marc Oromaner is a New York City writer whose book, The Myth of Lost offers a simple solution to Lost and uncovers its hidden insight into the mysteries of life. He can be contacted in the discussion section of The Myth of Lost Facebook page.

The Myth of Lost is available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com.

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Marc Oromaner

Marc Oromaner is a spiritual author and speaker who teaches how we can discover our destiny using clues found in the media and in our lives. His book, The Myth of Lost deciphers the hidden wisdom of the hit TV show and explains how we can use this wisdom to overcome our own challenges. His blog, "The Layman's Answers To Everything" points out the patterns that run through all great stories including our own. These patterns are clues that are meant to guide us towards a life full of love, light, and fulfillment.