10 Films That Are Better The Less You Know Going In

8. 2012

Back when climate change was a less imminent crisis and social media hadn’t got round to destabilising democracy yet, the Apocalypse was a more speculative thing. Famously, the ancient Mayan calendar was due to end in December 2012, and a surprising number of people took this as a sign that our world would end with it. Not one to pass up an opportunity to make some money off the idea, in stepped Hollywood.

Released in 2009, the film 2012 follows struggling sci-fi writer Jackson Curtis, played by John Cusack, as he attempts to keep his family safe when the fateful end of the world hits.

Once described by comedian Dara O’Briain as ‘John Cusack outruns lava for two hours’, the convenience with which the plot armoured characters are kept just slightly faster than the encroaching devastation is laughable in itself, but anybody with some understanding of physics would find this film utterly infuriating.

The scientific reason for the upcoming doomsday, announced without a hint of irony, is that ‘the neutrinos have mutated, and they’re heating up the planet’. Neutrinos are subatomic particles which are fundamental to the makeup of the entire Universe. They don’t change, much less ‘mutate’, and any physicist speaking these words out loud in the real world would be laughed out of the scientific community.

For those of us not in the know, 2012 is a harmless bit of over the top disaster fun, but for anyone with a passing knowledge of physics, it’s absolute sacrilege.