Put your brain on hold

Rating: 5/10 (7 January 2011)

In the not-so-grand tradition of "When Worlds Collide," "Earthquake," "The Day After Tomorrow," "Armageddon," "Deep Impact," "The Core," etc., "2012" is a big-budget disaster picture with a low-budget mentality. Just how foolish it will look in 2013 is anyone's guess - though it couldn't possibly look any more foolish than it did when it was released in 2009. And all courtesy of that Grand Poobah of disaster flicks, Roland Emmerich.
The doomsday scenario in this instance comes in the form of exploding solar radiation that has become so intense that it's begun to cause the Earth's core to melt (like a microwave oven, we're told), resulting in the wholesale destruction of the planet's crust. This obviously doesn't bode well for the people dwelling on the surface, where life as we know it will soon cease to exist - just as the Mayans so cannily predicted centuries ago.
As with any disaster-movie worthy of the title, the story involves little more than an assortment of stock characters trying to keep one step ahead of the impending apocalypse. This particular cross-section of humanity includes John Cusack as a writer of prescient but less-than-commercially-successful sci-fi novels, Amanda Peet as his ex-wife, Danny Glover as the President of the United States, Thandie Newton as the President's daughter, Oliver Platt as his self-interested Chief of Staff, Chiwetel Ejiofor as a brilliant geologist, and, for comic relief purposes, Woody Harrelson as a bug-eyed, trailer-dwelling, crackpot conspiracy theorist whose theoretic conspiracies turn out to be anything but crackpot.
And because of the enormous and far-reaching nature of the disaster, the movie can borrow bits from any number of previous disaster movies and get away with it; thus, we get a touch of "The Day After Tomorrow" here, a smidgen of "The Poseidon Adventure" there. Heck, there's even a hint of "Wall-E" in the closing moments.
There's always an odd and uncomfortable moral principle operating in films of this type: namely, who cares if the whole world is going to hell in a hand basket, so long as our intrepid band of survivors (usually including an adorable pet or two) makes its way to safety. And the trite and corny estranged-spouse melodrama involving Cusack and Peet that Emmerich and co-writer Harald Klasser have seen fit to plaster onto their vision of a worldwide holocaust is enough to make us start rooting for humanity's wholesale annihilation long before the movie's hit the halfway mark. Apparently, in contradiction to what Rick said at the end of "Casablanca," the problems of a couple of little people DO amount to a hill of beans, after all - at least in the eyes of Hollywood.
Of course, one doesn't go to these types of films in search of grand themes or complex characterizations, but rather for the epic and wanton destruction of all things animate and inanimate - and in that respect, at least, "2012" delivers the goods. In fact, the action and special effects are so preposterous and over-the-top that one can't help but admire the sheer, unadulterated, childlike trashiness of it all.
So hunker on down to watch humanity get the ass-kicking of a lifetime - just make sure to have plenty of popcorn and Jujubes on hand to help get you through the experience.