Director of '2012' Destroys Rome, Spares Mecca

No one would ever accuse director Roland Emmerich of being subtle or shy. The German-born filmmaker has blown up or mowed down just about everything on Earth in movies from "Independence Day" (bye-bye, White House!) to "Godzilla" (sayonara, Manhattan!) to "The Day After Tomorrow" (welcome to our world, Antarctica!).

As for religion, he also takes no prisoners. He is openly gay and a fairly "outlandish provocateur," as he himself boasts. His London home features a wax sculpture of Pope John Paul II laughing as he reads his own obituary (sitting under the stair, like Harry Potter), and a Photoshopped picture of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "wearing an open dressing gown revealing a hairy six-pack."

"I would like to erase all nations and religions," as Emmerich put it to an interviewer in 2008.

Yet in his new big-screen, high-tech, end-of-the-world (again) thriller, "2012," Emmerich seems to have lost his nerve -- at least when it comes to Islam.In the movie -- the title refers to an ancient Mayan prophecy that some believe predicts the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012 -- Emmerich goes out of his way to show the destruction of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica, as well as the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer that stands on a mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro.

The reason? "Because I'm against organized religion," as Emmerich tells SciFiWire.com.

Well, almost. When it came to showing the destruction of Mecca, and specifically the Kaaba, the cube-shaped building that all Muslims face when they pray, Emmerich got cold feet.

"Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit," Emmerich says of his desire to smash the Kaaba. "But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right."

Such reasoning may be, well, reasonable. The caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper in 2005 led to violent reactions in Muslim communities. And the fear of sparking more violence remains so strong that Yale University Press decided not to include the drawings in a new book that is only about the drawings. (The volume, "The Cartoons That Shook the World," was published last month.)

But Emmerich's sudden sensitivity to Islam, or his sense of self-preservation, doesn't make some Catholics too happy.

"Emmerich is more than a coward -- he is a liar who has it out for Catholics," fumes the Catholic League's Bill Donohue.

It's hard not to see Donohue's point. In one scene in "2012" (the film comes out yes, Friday the 13th) Emmerich has the huge cupola of Saint Peter's Basilica roll over the masses gathered in the square below to pray, crushing them like bugs.

"Why...don't [we] have the church fall on people's head?" Emmerich said by way of explaining his thinking. "The whole Vatican kind of tips and kind of rolls over the people. It said something, because in the story, some people...believe in praying and prayer, and they pray in front of the church, and it's probably the wrong thing, what they would do in that situation."

It is, of course, sometimes hard to think straight when the world is ending.

Yet in his recent comments about the movie, there are hints that Emmerich may have done some thinking about his choices that goes a bit deeper than his usual boilerplate statements.

"We have to all...in the Western world... think about this," Emmerich says at one point, regarding his choice to destroy Catholic symbols rather than Muslim ones. "You can actually...let..Christian symbols fall apart"-- actually, the director destroys them, but that's a quibble -- "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."

Yeah, kind of. Oh, and the Kaaba is a Muslim symbol, actually, not Arab. And Arabs comprise about 15 percent of the global Muslim population.

But Emmerich has time to learn, and even redo. Emmerich has already announced plans for a sequel to "2012," a TV drama called "2013" that focuses on a band of survivors who repopulate the Earth. Adam and Eve, anyone?

In Hollywood, it seems even the End of the World is not The End.