Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch 2012
2009 · Roland Emmerich · 2012 on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the film swing between cramped car interiors and continents. (staging)
Emmerich alternates the planetary and the domestic on a steady beat: a fracturing coastline, then four people jammed in a vehicle, then a fracturing coastline again.
Payoff: The scale only registers because you keep returning to a family-sized space, which is how the film keeps an unimaginable event legible. In the reading: respiration-space. The reading calls this the respiration of the action-image: the vast world and the tight line of the escape trading places.
Count the separate stories the film keeps cutting between. (cutting)
The Curtis family's flight, the scientists, the politicians, and the vignettes around the world. As the clock tightens, Brenner and Elliot shorten the intervals between them.
Payoff: The suspense is made by the cutting rather than by any doubt about the outcome. You are watching a rescue machine speed up. In the reading: montage-organic-american. The reading calls this American convergent montage: parallel lines drawn tighter until someone arrives in time, the oldest device in the medium.
Follow the camera as it plunges down collapsing streets. (camera)
Semler favors sweeping aerials and crane moves that drop through breaking cityscapes, with a practical foreground extended into a huge digital environment behind it.
Payoff: Speed and size are delivered by camera movement, so the destruction reads as something you are traveling through rather than watching from outside.
Notice that even the destruction stays brightly and evenly lit. (light)
There is no murk or smoke-obscured chaos here. Semler lights for clarity in cool grays and ash tones, then warms up for the family scenes.
Payoff: The film wants every collapse fully visible. Nothing is hidden for atmosphere, because being able to see it is the entire product.
Listen for the low rumble under the shifting ground. (sound)
The mix is built on sub-bass: the heave of the crust, the roar of water, structural splintering. The score by Kloser and Wanker sits on top of it, broad and symphonic.
Payoff: Digital destruction is given weight by frequency. You feel the catastrophe in your chest, which is what convinces you it has mass.
Once you have seen it
Watch the monument shots where nobody is doing anything. (staging)
The dome of St. Peter's coming down on a crowd, Christ the Redeemer breaking apart, a carrier riding a wave into the White House. No character acts in these images.
Payoff: The film pauses its own chase to hold up a picture. These are the moments it most wants you to remember, and nothing is at stake in them. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls these attraction-images: pictures staged to be beheld rather than acted in, each one a self-contained postcard of apocalypse.
Count who gets a berth on the arks and who decides. (structure)
Seats are sold, reserved, and rationed by men in rooms, and the film keeps returning to the gate and the list while the geology does its work.
Payoff: Underneath the spectacle is a triage plot about who is chosen to live, which gives the last act its only real argument.
Watch how quickly each new character is typed. (performance)
Cusack is the resourceful father, Ejiofor the conscience, Platt the man doing the arithmetic, Harrelson the prophet nobody believes. Each is fixed within a scene of arriving.
Payoff: The acting is built to be read instantly, because the film needs you to place a stranger before the next collapse starts.
Carry this in: Watch the shots where nobody is escaping. The film's biggest images are ones you are meant to behold, not follow.