2012: Mayan Prophecy (2009, NR)

Not to be confused with the 2009 action/drama starring John Cusack, this direct-to-video documentary is about the origin of the ancient Mayan prophecy/calendar end and other theories/prophecies with a similar date.

This film had a pretty slow start with repetitious CG graphics, so it looked kind of like they didn't have much to say, but it did get more filled in with content a little later.  The first half, after a brief mention of the Mayan calendar ending on 12/21/2012, was mostly about various theories by mathematicians, historians and sociologists (sometimes using ancient cultures as a starting point) that all point to huge and often mysterious changes to be expected around 2012 as well.  Some of these theories include alien invasion (popularly predicted in The X-Files), complete novelty of events (apparently there's a theoretical maximum to newness in the world/universe that is expected in 2012 due to some math based on the Chinese book, I Ching), the asymptote of the graph for doubling of human knowledge (basically the species would have infinite knowledge at that point (?)), the invention of time travel, the human species becoming one huge organism, etc.  The descriptions of each of these theories makes it make a little bit of sense, and presumably it would make much more sense if one were to study one of them in detail.  Otherwise it's just pop-science which is to be taken with a grain of salt unless disregarded as a downright misleading headline regarding an otherwise exciting or mundane discovery.  Anyway, while I don't think we can expect any of these things to happen with any degree of certainty, it's certainly some interesting food for thought, and I'll look forward to the actual day and see what happens (I kind of expect the same thing that happened in Y2K... a fun party and not much else).  The second half does delve more into the actual Mayan prophecy and the end of the calendar, the system behind it and the religion involved.

I'm glad to now have some basic familiarity with it but still don't feel like I know or understand as much about it as I would like to if I intended to talk about it with any sort of authority.  I don't know how much I could hope to learn about the subject matter from a film of barely over an hour, but I still felt like I didn't get what I would like to have gotten out of it.  For me it's about 2 stars.  If you want to dip your toes in the pool and find out kind of what people will be ignorantly spouting about, then go ahead and watch this movie, but if you're really interested in the subject matter, I'd say check out a full book on the material or go to Wikipedia.