FANCY revelling in the destruction of the Sistine Chapel, and see the toppling of the famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro? Then get yourselves off to see Roland Emmerich’s global demolition derby of a movie, 2012, which opens in UK cinemas tomorrow.
In his latest offering the director again gets to indulge his passion for destroying famous landmarks, this time including religious ones, on a biblical scale.
In his previous flicks, Emmerich’s destroyed the Empire State Building and the White House (Independence Day), sent a giant monster into the middle of Manhattan (Godzilla), blew away the famous Hollywood sign and the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles (The Day After Tomorrow) and savaged New York – again – by flooding and then freezing it (also The Day After Tomorrow).
But if you’re expecting to see an Islamic icon take a hit – dream on.
Kaaba – the one that got away.
True, Emmerich – who is “against organised religion” – wanted to trash the Kaaba, the cube-shaped building at the heart of Mecca, but bottled out. The director said:
Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit. But my co-writer Harald said ‘I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie’. And he was right. … We have to all … in the Western world … think about this. You can actually … let … Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have … a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it’s just something which I kind of didn’t [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.
Ah well, maybe if Geert Wilders manages to find the funds for a more ambition movie than Fitna, this sorry omission will be rectified. 2012 reputedly cost $200-million. You could flatten the Kaaba for real for a fraction of that price. I am joking, of course!
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
November 12th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Of course by allowing himself to be intimidated in this way he lets the fatwa-ists know that their death threats are effective, though I acknowledge that that is very easy for me to say. Still, only the truth is eternal and as the tenets of Islam are untrue they only have a finite life.
November 12th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
when I see that picture, I imagine the crowd shouting “We want beer and Bacon, stop hiding it all in the Kaaba…
November 12th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Beer and bacon in Islam’s answer to the Tardis? They’re sharpening their knives as we speak, Rog.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:29 am
I won’t be watching the movie 2012 until after Jan 1st 2013.
There are morons who beleive that the world is actually going to end in 2012, you know like it was going to end in 2000 and it was supposed to end last year when they switched on the large hadron collider and Earth was going to be sucked into a black hole.
November 13th, 2009 at 5:22 am
If I could direct a disaster flick, I’d have a meteor wipe out Mecca and Medina, smaller ones landing on the more obnoxious neighbourhoods within Israel and Palestine, a huge blob of antimatter erasing every US red state, a nasty gas wafting through the Vatican (killing off PanzerPope while sparing the artwork) and finally send something small and vicious down the chimney of Lambeth Palace.
November 13th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Emmerich is a bit of an arssewit, true. But how many American cinema goers would recognise the Sistine Chapel, let alone Mecca and Medina? Come on, these are the same Americans who need ‘London, England’ to appear at the bottom of the screenw when a red bus drives past the Palace of Westminster. ‘Paris, France’, cue picture of Eiffel Tower. Idiots.
Incidentally, is it true that the Kaaba contains a meteorite that’s been worshipped by Arabs (those famous non-idolators) since prehistoric times?
November 13th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
valdemar
Reminds me of the story of the renaming of The Madness of George 111
to The Madness of King George so the American audiences didn’t think it was a sequel.
November 13th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
@ chrsbol And then there’s the story of the movie Timbuktu having its title shortened to Timbuk so folk wouldn’t think it was a sequel.
November 14th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Didn’t someone else see Malcolm X and wonder when the previous nine Malcolms were released?
November 14th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Fahrenheit 451, Slaughter House 5 & Superman 4 confused me for the same reason.
November 15th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Some truth will not appear overnight.
I read some comments and sensed some good ideas and others shallowness of thinking
Human life – my dear friends – is on the stake here.
And this thinking of “anybody” will change by the passage of time.
Deep inside you . Think of something changed in your attitude towards a topic or else ten years ago from now.
Surely some during teenage thinks differently from the twenties and thirties.
Ask the elderly about the taste of apples when they were younger?!