Truly the most important things destroyed during 2012 are your brain cells.
Emmerich is the modern day Irwin Allen, the producer/director of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, released during the 1970’s, the golden era for the disaster film. Allen’s name was synonymous with the genre which featured all-star casts and multiple storylines revolving around catastrophe. Emmerich has certainly topped Allen’s excess using the latest in special effects. He’s destroyed the world with aliens, giant lizards, and ice. Now, he’s done away with any kind of pretense at all. The world will end in 2012 and there’s no need to explain any further than that.
The film begins with geologist Dr. Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovering solar flares are causing the planet’s core to overheat which will lead to a series of unbelievable natural disasters. Usually, nobody listens to the scientist. Not this time. White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) takes Helmsley’s reports seriously. Along with President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover), they begin secretly constructing massive arks to safely house the world’s leaders as well as the most wealthy and influential people of the world. The average Joe? He’s pretty much screwed.
The everyman point of view here is from the perspective of Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a former sci-fi writer now working as a limo driver. His boss is obnoxious Russian millionaire Yuri Karpov (Zlatko Buric) who just happens to be one of the few to buy a ticket to salvation. Curtis is divorced from wife Kate (Amanda Peet) who now lives with plastic surgeon Dr. Gordon Silberman (Thomas McCarthy). Dr. Silberman just happens to have worked on Karpov’s mistress Tamara (Beatrice Rosen). Yes, this is one of those movies where out of billions upon billions of people, a select few run into each other over and over again.
On a chance camping trip, Curtis runs into Dr. Helmsley as well as Charlie Frost, a nutty conspiracy theorist played by the equally nutty Woody Harrelson. Frost informs Curtis of the Mayan’s predictions about the end of the world in 2012. Clued in, Curtis quickly gets to his family to miraculously escape just as L.A. crumbles into the Pacific.
2012 is disaster porn at its finest. Emmerich leaves no stone unturned. He blew up the White House in Independence Day, Upping the ante, he destroys the White House again along with all of D.C., Vatican City, Yellowstone, and the Eiffel Tower. Two cute kids and a dog are tossed in to really tug at your heartstrings. Don’t bother to inject any type of logic or deeper thought into the proceedings. 2012 is pure, dumb shlock, jam packed with cheap thrills. Well, not so cheap for Sony who coughed up over $200 million for the budget. 2012’s overinflated budget and excessive 2 and a half hour runtime are indicative of the bloated blockbusters being churned out by Hollywood.
Rating: *
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