Hey, Roland Emmerich! You killed millions in Independence Day, millions more in The Day After Tomorrow, and, now, with 2012, BILLIONS!
What are you going to do next? Blow up Disneyland?
I have to admit, on one level it's sad to see Emmerich deliver his magnum opus -- the disaster-moviemaker's equivalent of Alexander The Great weeping at the realization there were no more worlds to conquer.
Or incinerate with alien heat rays. Or freeze. Or crack open from the stresses of a boiling molten core causing Los Angeles to fall into the sea and tidal waves to engulf the Himalayas.
Emmerich has indeed hinted this will be his last crack at the planet. And maybe that's a good thing. Because if anything is proved by 2012 -- his kitchen-sink nod to the end-of-days Mayan calendar vogue -- it's that there is such a thing as Armageddon Fatigue.
Watch the world end for two solid hours -- with John Cusack and Amanda Peet six feet ahead of certain death the entire time -- and you'll be surprised how little you start to care after a while.
No more hilariously preposterous than any of his previous efforts (and less so than, say, 10,000 B.C., in which paleolithic humans ran in a few days from Northern Europe to Egypt, to find woolly mammoths building the Pyramids), 2012 does answer the question of what a filmmaker with no great attachment to logic does when he can't choose between instruments of destruction.
The answer: he exploits them all. Hence the movie's opening -- a sunstorm so powerful it produces mutated neutrinos that, as mentioned, "boil" the Earth's core, triggering every conceivable disaster from the Yellowstone Park supervolcano, to the San Andreas to the resurrection of Pauly Shore's career (okay, we dodged the bullet on that last one).
So far, so apocalyptic. But Emmerich has a post-9/11 conspiracy-era curveball to throw into this neutrino stew. Seems the government knows -- including good-guy President Danny Glover and his evil Chief of Staff Oliver Platt. Actually all governments do. And between keeping it from the public (because we'd, y'know, panic and do crazy things like buy houses we can't afford), governments of the world are busy choosing 500,000 people to save (as you might expect, the rich get priority, which seems silly, since money would presumably become useless).
Only one man knows the truth, an Art Bell-type talk-radio looney (Woody Harrelson) who broadcasts from a shack atop the smoldering super-caldera at Yellowstone. Believe it or not, Harrelson's performance here makes his turn in Zombieland look subdued. He's the only human able to make himself heard above the din of crap blowing up, and his presence in the movie is way too short.
But he is there long enough to pass on details of the coming Apocalypse and conspiracy to Jackson Curtis (Cusack), a divorced dad who brings his kids to his favourite Yellowstone lake, which turns out to have evaporated. Thus apprised, with minutes to spare everywhere he goes, Curtis sets out to save his wife, his kids, their new stepdad, and score scalpers' tickets for a spot on the Ark.
The inevitability of Curtis's death-cheating does give the movie a weirdy-enjoyable Looney Toons quality for a while. And Emmerich does stage certain mass-death scenes with a perverse/profane sense of humour (example: the destruction of The Vatican).
Eventually, however, 2012 becomes a fireworks display that loses its ability to provoke oohs and ahhs.
(This film is rated PG)
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