It's no Hamlet

Rating: 6/10 (16 March 2012)

What amazes me is the number of hugely negative reviews here for 2012, slating it for not being 'intellectual' or 'emotional' and so on. That it disregards the Mayan prophecies and so forth. This film isn't Shakespeare and it never pretends to be. This is pure popcorn entertainment - and not all entertainment has to be Jules Verne or Tolkien. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and watch impossible things happen to perfectly normal people.
*Spoilers below*
Are there huge leaps of logic - a man with a few hours flight experience in a single engine plane able to fly a multi-engine plane and then co- pilot a huge cargo aircraft, for example - yes, there are. Sure, there's masses of stereotypes (bad guy turns good at the end, the estranged couple find renewed love in the light of a brave new world) and the number of near misses (at least three aircraft take off's from collapsing runways, getting the rescue ships engines running seconds before it is destroyed by slamming into Mount Everest) is staggeringly unbelievable. But guess what? This is about the complete destruction of the world in a matter of days, believability went out the window in the first two minutes of the film.
Anyone who saw the trailers and expected to see a National Geographic documentary about the end of the world deserves to be disappointed. This film isn't about being believable. It's about throwing the most astonishing 'what ifs' at you that they could come up with. What if the entire San Andreas fault (and all the branching fault lines) triggered at once? What if Yellowstone park erupted? What if... what if... what if... On and on it goes, one massive disaster after another. And you know what? It's entertaining to watch the spectacle unfold.
My advice? Grab a beer, turn up the volume, turn off the more critical aspects of your brain and just let yourself be entertained for a while.