Yes, you read the title of this posting right: I just wrote that 2012 has brilliance. Did I lose all credibility with you in doing so? Hear me out.

Realize, that I did not say that 2012 was a brilliant film. Or a great one. Or even a good one! But yes, there are moments of brilliance in it. And I’m not talking about the digital effects, although they are definitely eye-opening in detail, clarity and believability. But, not to take anything from all the crafts-people who created them, they are purely mechanical execution and what you expect to see with the kind of money spent to produce the film.

No, where the real “brilliance” of 2012 is found in how the script takes the genre elements and -- to use the words of  my good friend Nigel Tufenl-- cranks ‘em up to 11. The plot itself  is a hackneyed Chicken Little “the end is coming, the end is coming” disaster movie (although I do have to give them credit for using the Mayan end-of-calendar thing to tap into lingering millennial unease). The characters are essentially stick-figures who are quickly established simply so there are human entities to watch run around and dodge all the carnage and destruction.

But oh, what destruction!

And it is in the details of that destruction where the script’s brilliance is found. It is _so_ over-the-top that you’re forced to experience one of two reactions: either utter submission or complete intellectual shutdown. My wife nearly suffered sprained eye muscles from rolling her eyes so much. But myself ... I was in complete awe at the sheer audacity of such moments as:

-- A fleeing limo containing our hero and his family crashing through the side of a horizontally collapsing glass skyscraper, then catapulting safely through the other side.

-- Two cute li’l old lady drivers ramming into the side of a instantaneously erupting chunk of the San Andreas fault, causing their vehicle to erupt into an accordioning ball of firey 1970’s Detroit metal?

But the piece de resistance? Our hero and family flying a twin engine Cesena UNDER a subway car ejected out of the side of another uplifted slab of Los Angeles’s underbelly. Truly inspiring!

Granted, this is not the kind of writing that will win Oscars or critical praise (well, me excluded, obviously), but it demonstrates what writers need to do when working within a genre: embrace its elements and then_push_ them to their furthest borders. Don’t be satisfied with what has be done so many times already; that will be the death of your script.

I recently worked with a writer who had an adventure script that, for the most part, she was executing well. Then she had a moment where the hero was faced down by the antagonist bearing a gun. And how did she have the hero disarm the villain?

By acting as if he saw someone coming up behind the gunman. And the gunman actually fell for it and turned around. Sigh. Weak, right?

Absolutely! Would Emmerich have been satisfied with that? Hell no! And neither should you. As a struggling writer to establish him or herself, you need to be as creative and highly original as possible, creatingmoments that haven't been seen before and pushing the boundaries of your chosen genre.

Even if you too are, yet again, annihilating the world as we know it, one more time.