The end of the world again

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 18 November 2009 15:44

If or when the world finally ends, expect the cataclysm to arrive with a sense of déjà vu.

We have seen the ultimate catastrophe happen over and over again on the silver screen, and last weekend yet another planet-chomping film arrived in theaters, Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” to dazzle us with extravagant mayhem we never thought we’d see, or survive.

Supposedly, as New Age hucksters tell us, the ancient Mayan calendar comes to an end on Dec. 21, 2012, foretelling a worldwide catastrophe that will hit on that date. If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll wish it did.

Emmerich doesn’t make much of this in his flick, however. It is mentioned in passing, but the real purpose of the film is to display computer-generated special effects, not to promote some knuckleheads’ hoary, pseudo-religious end-of-the-world nonsense.

And that is all for the best, since nobody is more embarrassed by the Mayan calendar story than the poor Maya, down in old Yucatan.

Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, said he is sick and tired of people asking him whether the end of the calendar on Dec. 21, 2012 means the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012. “I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff,” he told the Associated Press.

Long before Columbus, the Maya Indians were obsessed with math. They created an elaborate calendar with overlapping, mathematical cycles to predict the future and provide guidance during current events, something the ancient Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Celts and others did using astrology, auspices and omens.

The Mayan calendar started in 3114 B.C., and periodically all the multiple cycles end on the same day roughly every 394 years, a period known as a Baktun.

Some ancient Mayan glyphs contain a prophesy that something important would happen when the multiple cycles in their calendar all end for the 13th time on, you guessed it, Dec. 21, 2012. The Maya considered 13 a sacred number, and the 13th Baktun is supposed to have something to do with Bolon Yokte, a war and creation deity.

But experts in ancient Mayan anthropology say the New Age stories about cataclysms don’t come from the New World Maya, but rather from Old World millennial end-of-the-world beliefs. In other words, the 2012 catastrophe story is closer to the Y2K computer disaster story or the Heaven’s Gate cult than anything having to do with the Maya.

None of that matters to Emmerich, a German filmmaker who has made piles of money tormenting the planet Earth and its inhabitants. Evil aliens invaded the Earth in his “Independence Day,” but not before they destroyed New York, the District of Columbia and Los Angeles right before our eyes. In “The Day After Tomorrow,” global warming turned the climate against us, and Los Angeles and New York were destroyed right before our eyes.

In the new film, he destroys New York, the District of Columbia, Los Angeles and several other major cities right before our eyes. A mile-high tsunami washes across India and floods out the Himalayan Mountains. Another tsunami picks up an aircraft carrier and drops it on the White House.

Emmerich was going to include Mecca in the special effects destruction, but left it out rather than wind up on a fundamentalist Muslim hate list. The Vatican isn’t so lucky, however, because Emmerich figured the Pope wouldn’t send suicide bombers to kill him for it.

Amid the destruction of human civilization, a cute divorced couple played by John Cusak and Amanda Peet renew their marriage commitment for the sake of their children, so some good comes of it.

As in “The Day After Tomorrow,” the biggest loser in the film is science, though architecture comes in for quite a beating as well. Emmerich’s “2012” needs a lot of pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo to put the cataclysm in motion.

He supposes that a solar flare unleashes a massive beam of neutrinos at the Earth’s core, overheating it and setting off a geophysical nightmare. The fact is, the sun shoots about 50 trillion neutrinos through each person’s body every second without the slightest effect. Never mind, though, because it is all in good escapist fun to get our minds off the recession, the national debt, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and global warming.

Even though we have all these real problems to worry about, NASA put out a press release last week to assure us not to worry about Emmerich’s fake problem. A solar flare isn’t going to turn us into toast, said NASA.

If you want to see a realistic movie depiction of the end of the world, wait for “The Road,” the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which is coming to theaters soon.

If it is true to the book, it will have no explosions, no tsunamis and no destruction of cities. And the cause of the disaster isn’t spelled out, so we’re spared the pseudo-science and pseudo-religion. But it probably will scare you a lot more than “2012” and make you think.

Emmerich isn’t likely to begin making movies that make us think, but he recently vowed to stop destroying the Earth.

“This is my last, quote-unquote, action-disaster movie,” he told the New York Times. “I know I can’t destroy the world again. That would be kind of a joke.”

It would also be déjà vu all over again.