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2012: Difference between revisions
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* [[Banned in China]]: Averted thanks to {{spoiler|China helping to save the world}}.
** Played completely straight in North Korea, thanks to the titular year being the 100th anniversary of Kim-Il Sung's birth.
* [[Bratty Half
** Also Jackson's son, whose snottiness towards his father in the first few minutes is incredibly annoying.
* [[California Collapse]]: Massive earthquakes tear up California and send it ''straight'' down.
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* [[Conspiracy Theorist]]: Charlie Frost again. Of course, he is right about what's happening, and sets into motion the race to get to the Ark.
* [[Contrived Coincidence]]: The various ways in which Jackson and his family meet up with the other groups in the story. It's lampshaded when the geological expert sees Jackson's family get aboard the Ark - he wonders how they managed to get on...
* [[Convection, Schmonvection]]: The movie seems to forget that in pyroclastic flows, the heat kills people long before the ash cloud touches them. Of course, they ''do'' stay barely ahead of the flow itself. While that's already testing of the [[Suspension of Disbelief]], if they were all the way in the cloud, they'd be dead. They do very briefly get caught inside of the flow in an airplane, which makes even less sense, since airplanes generally don't run well ''in clouds of superheated ash''.
** Bizarrely, the film then starts paying attention to the laws of physics again, just in time for said pyroclastic flow to utterly disintegrate Las Vegas airport (and, implicitly, the city itself). Guess the family had some [[Plot Armor]] in that plane of theirs.
* [[Cool Boat|Cool Boats]]: {{spoiler|The Arkships}}. And the Antonov An-225, dubbed "Antonov 500" in the film, makes a pretty [[Cool Plane]] too.
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* [[Expy]]:
** The unnamed, former [[Arnold Schwarzenegger|actor-turned-California governor]] [[The Ahnold|with a thick Austrian accent]]
** [
** [[British Royal Family]]: a quick shot as they are loading the Arks shows an elderly well-dressed woman in a purple coat with Corgis, undoubtedly Queen Elizabeth II (and her family.)
** The inspirational black president, though this may just be a latter-day example of [[Bald Black Leader Guy]].
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** Subverted with {{spoiler|Tony and Satnam's families,}} and a lot of off-screen child deaths.
* [[Informed Flaw]]: (or, to be more precise, Informed Inability) Gordon claims to have had only a few flying lessons, but performs impressive feats of stunt piloting during the escape from California. He is, of course, improvising and is helped along by an actual pilot on the Russian plane.
* [[Ironic Echo]]: In California, an old woman chides "I told ya we shoulda moved back to Wisconsin." Later on, aboard [[Air Force One]], Anheuser discovers the planet's new south magnetic pole is in Wisconsin. At the end, the final sentence of Jackson's novel turns out to be "Somehow or another, we all had relatives in Wisconsin." There were quite a few chuckles from Wisconsin audiences at all 3 lines. Kinda makes you wonder what made Wisconsin so popular with the producer. This could be a [[Shout
* [[Jerk With a Heart of Gold]]: Gordon, who at first appears to just be a toolish plastic surgeon. The kids love him (so we know he can't be all bad) but what really shows his better side is finding out he tried to talk Tamara ''out of'' getting plastic surgery. {{spoiler|While Yuri's still a asshole for leaving Tamara, he does manage to get his children on board Ark 4 before dying a horrible death.}}
* [[Kill the Cutie]]: {{spoiler|Poor Tamara}}.
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* [[Meaningful Name]]:
** The kid is named [[The Bible|Noah]] and is the reason Ark 04 didn't sink.
** Boorish President-by-Default Carl ''[[George W. Bush|Anheuser]]'', who is first seen in the movie partying and ignoring warning signs of dangerous happenings-to-be.
* [[A Million Is a Statistic]]: Anheuser, who points out they can't save everybody. {{spoiler|He attempts to abandon Ark 4 due to this.}}
* [[Monumental Damage]]: The film gives us the destruction of the following landmarks:
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** Also the President is black though considerably different in background.
** And Germany's Chancellor is female.
** Yuri Karpov looks suspiciously similar in appearance and hairstyle to [http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:5Jjf5SHmV-JMeM Shabtay Kalmanovich], a recently murdered oligarch known for his patronage of sporting events. Russian boxer Zultan seems to be a stand-in for [
* [["No. Just... No" Reaction]]: Roland Emmerich's initial idea of showing the destruction of Mecca was met with this response by his fellow producers and writers, with one of them saying that he didn't want a fatwa issued against him. Emmerich would later point out the [[Double Standard]] inherent in this, as there wasn't any controversy over the destruction of Vatican City and the Cristo Redentor.
* [[No One Gets Left Behind]]: Brutally subverted by Anheuser, who tries to leave thousands of refugees behind right at the doors of the Ark. Also qualifies as a [[Moral Event Horizon]].
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* [[Pair the Spares]]: Subverted. It looks like {{spoiler|Gordon and Tamara will get together}} but they both die instead.
* [[Pet the Dog]]: Yuri is a massive [[Smug Snake]] throughout the entire film, {{spoiler|abandoning the rest of the party, including his girlfriend, in the Himalayas}}, but {{spoiler|selflessly gives his life to save his sons}}.
* [[Physics Goof]]: The Earth is being destroyed because solar neutrinos are "mutating" into a form that heats the interior of the Earth like a microwave oven. In reality, solar neutrinos '''do''' mutate -- they change between electron, muon, and tau flavors during their travels in a process called [
** Mocked mercilessly by Dara O'Briain in his "This is the Show".
{{quote| '''Dara:''' [The scientist] might as well have gone "the electrons... are ''angry''". Or "the light from the sun..." *sniffs* "it's gone off."}}
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** A review said the only thing Emmerich did not destroy was the [[Columbia Pictures]] logo at the beginning, which was considered [[Logo Joke|a missed opportunity.]]
* [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog]]: Gordon tries his best to be a good stepfather to Jackson's children, as well as getting on well with Jackson himself, and he manages to use his minimal flying experience to pilot several drastically different aircraft, and is never anything less than cooperative with the other characters. His reward is death.
* [[Shout
** ''[[The Poseidon Adventure]]'' gets one during a mid-sea tsunami wave...
** The limo race from a disintegrating L.A. plays like an [[Up to Eleven]] version of the last chase in ''[[Twister]]'', complete with a detour through a doomed building (rolling house vs collapsing skyscraper), the explosive crash-landing of a heavy vehicle (fuel truck on roadbed vs cement mixer into gas station), and the inevitable bit of silly "flack" glimpsed in midair (live cow vs giant donut).
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* [[Take That]]:
** A very lazy shot at [[Arnold Schwarzenegger]] ("He's an actor - he's reading from a script!"). There is a veritable myriad of [[Take That|take-thats]] in the film, but there's so many that it's kind of hard to pinpoint them all. Western civilization? Religion? Rich people? Russians?
* [[Take That, Critics!]]: A subtle one can be found in the adoration John Cusack's character's [[Sci Fi]] book gets. In the movie, the book sells barely a dozen copies because critics found its ridiculously [[Cosy Catastrophe]] view of the world to be insufferable and unrealistic, yet major characters (the president included!) find it be a source of great inspiration. Director Roland Emmerich also made ''[[The Day After Tomorrow]]'', which was criticized for being offensively preachy and silly in the levels of [[Cosy Catastrophe]] it brought to the screen.
* [[Tempting Fate]]: Many times. See Dramatic Irony.
* [[The Cuckoolander Was Right]]: Charlie and his prediction of the Yellowstone Caldera erupting.
* [[Throwaway Country]]: Sometimes played straight, sometimes ''subverted'' - e.g., India and China are given considerable focus beyond being nature's [[Chew Toy]]. Canada possibly fits this trope too. The world leaders conference at the beginning is held in British Columbia, and Canada is mentioned as having survivors on board one of the Arks.
* [[Tv Tropes Will Enhance Your Life]]: Tropers have gone into the theater after [[Independence Day|having browsed this very site]], [[The Day After Tomorrow|checking out tropes to look for]].
* [[Twenty
* [[Viewer
* [[What Measure Is a Mook?]]: Or an unnamed character.
* [[What Measure Is a Non-Cute?]]: Averted ''hard'' with {{spoiler|Tamara}}.
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