2012 : The Movie

On November 13th, one of the worst made movies will appear portraying one of the most talked about dates ever- December 21, 2012. As one pre-viewer wrote, "The special effects and the main parts of the cast had some of the worst quality I have ever seen. This film simply doesn't stand up to any criteria of good quality and was awful to watch. Hadn't it been because of the massive over-rating of this film it probably never would've been mentioned."

So, what about the Mayans themselves- those that still remain?

Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world. Or is it? Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.

A significant time period for the Mayas does end on the date, and enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments they say coincide in 2012, including one that happens roughly only once every 25,600 years. It may sound all too much like other doomsday scenarios of recent decades — the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, 1988 Biblical end date paranoia, the Jupiter Effect, or "Planet X."

So, what about Monument Six? Doesn't it have some grains of archaeological basis?

Found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, the stone tablet almost didn't survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted. It's unique in that the remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.

Erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible. Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, "He will descend from the sky."

If it were all mythology, perhaps it could be written off.

But some say the Maya knew another secret: the Earth's axis wobbles, slightly changing the alignment of the stars every year. Once every 25,600 years, the sun lines up with the center of our Milky Way galaxy on a winter solstice, the sun's lowest point in the horizon. That will happen on Dec. 21, 2012, when the sun appears to rise in the same spot where the bright center of galaxy sets.

Those are facts. The movie is fact-less!

Author John Major Jenkins says his two-decade study of Mayan ruins indicate the Maya were aware of the alignment and attached great importance to it. "If we want to honor and respect how the Maya think about this, then we would say that the Maya viewed 2012, as all cycle endings, as a time of transformation and renewal," said Jenkins.

Thee surely a lot of myths surrounding 2012, but we might be alert to where there is smoke, fires are close at hand. And that said, I’ll still see the movie regardless. :-)