2012 destroys the world, decimates its characters and annihilates its story.

Rating: 4/10 (27 September 2019)

Roland "Recipe for Disaster" Emmerich returns to his comfort zone. But instead of an alien invasion causing the destruction of an American city, or the environment teaching humanity a lesson by freezing yet another bustling city, he instead opts for the entire planet. Washington? See you later. London? Goodbye ol' chap. Tokyo? Sayounara. Emmerich attempts to convey his most important message yet. The world is not enough. He needs more planets to destroy. More CGI chaos to conduct. The yearning for omnipotence. Somebody stop him before we get the sequel '3,476,837', when the universe implodes. I cannot be dealing with another one-dimensional mish-mash of destruction with no literary engagement whatsoever. The world is suffering from cataclysms due to a solar flare and stuff, so it's up to family man Jackson to save his, well, family by outrunning the San Andreas fault, Yellowstone caldera and a colossal 1,500m tsunami.
Let's not beat around the incinerated bush as they say, chances are you watched this for the apocalyptic mayhem that Emmerich meticulously orchestrated. In which case good for you. The visual splendour and all-round screams of innocent civilians falling through the cracks of doom, will certainly keep viewers..ummm...engaged? Yeah, engaged. Entertained would be inappropriate. And obviously, the state-of-the-art technology is showcased exuberantly, with a slight undertone of melancholy as cities are wiped off the face of the Earth.
But y'know, when certain lines like "we're being pulled apart" are exerted, followed by a giant crack in the ground ferociously splitting a supermarket in half with the couple on each side, it just makes you wonder. How? How can a film so "90s", with all its buoyant intricacies and ridiculousness, become so overlong and tedious. Understandably, it's a disaster flick, not to be taken seriously and sprinkled with a tiny dusting of salt to spice up the premise. Yet holy sweet lord did I yawn more times than the Russian billionaire proclaiming his nationality in his best Vin Diesel impression possible.
The characters were lifeless. You shan't care if they drown, become crushed by a toppling skyscraper or incinerated by an exploding super volcano. They are literally a means to provide variance to the disasters, by travelling across the globe and narrowly escaping every situation by the thinnest of margins. Absurd. Absolutely stupid. The lines of dialogue were woeful. "I'm not wearing any pull-ups!". Shut it missy, before I launch you off this spaceship. The character choices themselves were baffling. Parking a camper van five miles away from the actual plane, meaning Jackson has to exert energy and outrun the sizzling caldera looming behind him. Tense? Eh. Lacking common sense? Definitely.
Yet my biggest gripe is, and altogether now, plot conveniences! Yes, they're back with a vengeance. Ready yourselves. So. Jackson, who goes back to save his ex-wife's family, is a writer who also chauffeurs a rich Russian billionaire around (who happens to have a ticket to a humanity-saving ark) whose wife is a patient of Jackson's ex-wife's partner, who is a plastic surgeon, who has the talent of piloting a plane with another pilot that is having an affair with Russian billionaire wife, who has no connection to a geologist who loved reading Jackson's book (that only sold 427 copies) who allowed Jackson and his kids to be escorted out of Yellowstone (to which they were trespassing) with no charges, but soon develops a romance with the President's daughter who has no real purpose to the story whatsoever, due to the President staying behind and...yeah. Whatever.
Ejiofor and Newton provide some good acting, everyone else ranged from bad to functional. And the most frustrating aspect is, that Emmerich dabbles into the moral and ethical consequences of not notifying humanity of their impending demise. The wealthy receiving and purchasing invites to save their lives whilst the rest of civilisation have no choice but to embrace death. But these infrequently forced moments of ethics were not enough to save this disaster flick from being the ironic overlong disaster that it is. Visually engaging, literarily snooze-inducing. Typical Emmerich I suppose...