I was wondering the same thing, so I did a quick google search. It looks like they're specially built ships that could wander the oceans until the storm is over. Modern day Noah's Arks basically.
Emmerich and Bay should team up and make a movie with all possible natural disasters, alien and giant robot invasions, terrorists blowing stuff up and so on occurring at once. No plot - just explosions and destruction. It will the most awesome movie ever made and will make approximately 237648127 gazzilion dollars.
Yeah, I read a Clive Cussler book where the villain was doing the same basic thing. And of course, Cussler is the Roland Emmerich of action novels. Definitely a popcorn movie. Who wants to bet that the "scientific" explanation in the movie uses pole shifting? For some reason people always seem to miss the fact that pole shifting refers to the magnetic poles of the planet reversing. Not the planet itself flipping orientation.
It certainly does look like "When Worlds Collide" - which I had heard Spielberg was supposed to be doing someday. Perhaps this was an attempt to beat Spielberg to the punch?
What happens when the earth breaks in half? You know Emmerich is planning it. Your house Your Basement .......Earth .......won't save you Next movie will have people leaving in ships that the goverment once again concealed till the time was right(ID4 and now 2012)
Their other movies have attempts at plots - Emmerich always adds some pointless and stupid family drama, for example ...
And it's pretty much always schlock pablum designed via "a+b=c" to move the destruction forward. Script by the same duo that managed 10,000 BC. We really need a *glyph of overwhelming dread* I'm soooooooooooo getting a 10.5 feeling off of this one. Absolute, utter, unmitigated, completely implausible scientific crapfest. One of those "oh, it's going to be bad, but for some reason passing logic, we're still going to watch it" movies. John Cusack's in it, which doomed me from before I ever saw a trailer.
John Cusack's gotta do the big blockbuster movie every now and then to get the big paycheck so he can do more of the small movies that no one goes to see. That's nice how that web site you linked to lifted the trailer from Yahoo and put their own stamp on it. If this movie were made in the 80s, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and Eddie Murphy would stop the end of the world... with bullets!
Yeah, that got a groan out of me too. Thing is, the Mayans believed in a cycle of destruction and rebirth every few thousand years; the events that mark the change from one world to another ought to be bad but could still be overcome by people with no technology and a far lower global population, otherwise humanity would have been wiped out by the previous events. Unless there's a reason why this one will be particularly bad... but then, if they think the Mayans are the earliest civilization, they probably didn't really bother to do much research into the Long Count and associated mythos. Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
^ This was bound to happen after Roland Emmerich and Dean "Godzilla is 100% scientifically accurate and I stand behind those words" Devlin split up.
If you check out some of the marketing sites for the movie, it makes the comparison more apt: The IHC-- complete with survivor lottery and White House News Feed-- Planet X to collide with Earth