As the year marked as the end of the Mayan calendar nears, 2012, the movie that promises to show what can happen to the world in that year also draws near. It’s based on something that’s highly-anticipated as the end of the world, thus, producers are expecting the special effects movie to be something of a prophetic vision of what can happen when the time comes. Of course, the timing of the movie has to be perfect. If it comes out too soon, it will not be able to ride along with the hype created in anticipation of the year when many people believe the world will end.

We’ve seen the first trailer where a Buddhist monk runs towards a temple to ring a bell—supposedly to warn of impending doom. Well, we all know what happened to that monk. He was wiped out by a huge flood that reached the tops of Tibetan mountains. In the second trailer, there are more Tibetan mountains, and, as expected, more destruction by water, and also by fire, falling rocks from space, earthquakes, and other things that are only hinted at. It’s not only the Buddhists that are depicted now. There are many Christian Catholic iconography also shown crumbling down and it’s also obvious that the writers have taken cues from Biblical stories, particularly from the Book of Genesis, where animals are saved with the help of an ark. This time, the ark seems to be a spaceship of some sort.

If I’m not mistaken, I think God promised Noah that he will never again destroy the face of the earth by water after the great flood. 2012 director, Roland Emmerich (who also directed 10,000 B.C.) apparently thinks otherwise—or at least he has to add such elements to make the movie a visual feast. As you can see in the movie trailer screen cap, there’s more destruction by water, water, water as one city is shown cracking and disappearing under an ocean! We can only surmise as to where all that water comes from. I mean, if the mountains of Tibet are submerged by the waves shown, there has to be enough water frozen as ice to be able to reach that high!

2012 is a movie that’s supposed to show what can possibly happen, if you really believe that there’s going to be cataclysmic changes in that year. Let’s hope that it will also take much from science fact as it does from doomsayers. Because if it doesn’t and it just shows destruction without any basis on fact, then it will not be very credible at all in spite of the fact that a big draw of the movie is its depiction of how civilization will be destroyed. If it doesn’t deliver in this area, the only thing that’s going to sink for 2012 are box office sales. This possibility is likely the reason why the studio slashed the movie’s production budget significantly. But it’s also likely lots of people will be watching this one, never mind some lapses in special effects. It stars John Cusack and Amanda Peet.