2012 Doomsday (2008)

I picked this up thinking it was the /other/ doomsday movie, little did I know it was a Christian propaganda movie, I should have guessed by the way every time Science ‘Fact’ was presented, it was so far from the mark I couldn’t help but shout either ‘Jesus Christ’ or ‘Good God’ at the screen. This is one of the worst things (I nearly said movie then) I’ve ever seen, take every hackneyed Christian slogan you can think of, throw in some stolen bits (that seem cool) from Celestine Prophecies, and The Da Vinci Code, really bad dialogue, really poor acting put it all together, and you will still have something so much better than this embarrassment. The film opens with a couple of archaeologists who are obviously at the top of their game, because when it comes to a new discovery of gold cross they immediately carbon date it (carbon dating gold? They must be good), they soon realise the Mayan prophecy of the end of the word, in fact, has NOTHING at all with the Mayan religion at all, it’s all about Christianity. A few non-Christians who believe in only what they can see, somehow (regardless of all we know about them so far) feel obliged to travel to a temple in the middle of nowhere (a Mayan temple NOT Christian temple remember) all while the planet is slowing down on its axis because we have come into alignment with the centre of the galaxy (when is something orbiting something else ever NOT in line with it?) to save the world (presumably). We now have a missionary (who lives with native people in the middle of the rainforest and yet, somehow barely speaks a word of Spanish), casually jog into a town, but no, she isn’t out for a nice jog, she is looking for a doctor because everybody in her village is ill because, as it is later revealed, they eat fish from a warm river, I kid you not. The lunacy continues until all the good Christians are taken leaving only the sinners to perish horribly when the world ends, except it doesn’t end, a few walls fall over then everything carries on as usual. The film has some side-splittingly funny dialogue, for example, "This is scientific proof that there were christians among the Mayans", and let’s not forget “I’ve programmed the artificial intelligence to work this out”. The acting was so bad I kept expecting Keanu Reeves to pop up. There were people who were atheists their whole lives, but suddenly were able to quote huge tracts of the bible to each other. Making a low budget film with a message often (but not always) leads to quite a bad movie, but this film should embarrass even the most obsessive hardcore Christians. For your own sanity, do NOT watch this movie!