Who cares about Cusack and his silly family?

Rating: 4/10 (30 December 2011)

When they made this movie, they were forgetting a fairly major point. If some distant planet is in danger of exploding, we might just identify with the few humans that happen to be there while it's happening. But this is not a distant planet. This is Earth in just a few months time from now.
The special effects in this movie are enough to make the viewer at least consider how awful it would be if this were really to happen. We see the planet fall apart before our eyes, and the realism is strikingly brilliant. The problem is, any concern we feel is for our own countries, our own people, our own families and loved ones. In my case, that's mainly western Europeans and South Americans. I feel for them as I see their homelands washed away under a sea of lava.
But that is not what this movie wants. It doesn't want me to feel concern for the annihilation of everything I have come to know and love. It wants me to care about Cusack and his nauseating family. I have very rarely seen a film in which I have desperately wanted the hero to die, but in this one I did. I want to know where I am, where my mother is, where my dog is, where my friends are... Cusack's silly little plastic Hollywood family is the least of my concerns right now as the world is about to end... I suppose we are meant to 'identify' with the lead family and imagine it was our own. But we don't. I would never want to wish my own family dead. Only Cusack's.