2012 Movies and the Mayan Predictions of Apocalypse

December 21, 2012. This is the last date that is recorded on the Mayan calender. Some say it's the end of the world. Some say there will be a great shift in human consciousness. Some say that Hollywood will stop making really bad movies.

Okay, that last one was mine. But it seems that Hollywood has snatched onto this latest bit and in the grand tradition of competing movie concepts (Deep Impact vs Armageddon), there are several projects coming to the Big Screen on this one.

Whitley Strieber (remember him, the guy who was abducted by aliens and wrote many book about it?) wrote a book called 2012: The War For Souls. Micheal Bay (Transformers fame) is going to direct a box office smash based on the book. In a huge bidding war, Roland Emmerich's project, simply titled 2012 is now being put together by Sony. It had originally been a Nickelodeon project. Kind of makes you wonder what kind of movie it will be. And then there's the Doomsday factor.

2012, has John Cusack as the great hero of the story. His family goes on vacation in December 2012 and he meets his alternate self in a parallel universe who is going to help him avert the apocalypse of the Mayan's predictions. Also on hand are Chiwetel Ejiofor (American Gangster,Children of Men), Danny Glover (Color Purple, Lethal Weapon, Dreamgirls), Thandie Newton (Crash, Norbit) and Oliver Platt (Three Musketeers, Lake Placid, Martian Child). The most interesting aspect of this movie seems to be the interconnection of the cast. Cusack and Platt were in Martian Child recently. Ejiofor and Glover are together in Toussaint (Glover directing and Ejiofor starring).Glover and Newton were in Beloved together. As for Emmerich, he has had some blockbusters and some misses. On the hit side there was The Patriot and Independence Day. On the miss side is the deplorable Godzilla and Day After Tomorrow.