Not Roland Emmerich's Best Movie

Rating: 2/10 (10 July 2016)

I generally like Roland Emmerich's movies. They're not great but they're fun. I thought Stargate, Independence Day, and even Godzilla, were decent movies. But I didn't particularly like 2012. There's really only one reason I didn't like it but it's a big reason: the film gives you no reason for you to care more about the main characters than the billions of other people who die. Yes, tons of innocent people die in other disaster movies, like Independence Day and Dante's Peak (probably my favorite disaster movie), but the vast majority of the human race isn't killed in those. I didn't care about the family. I did care about Gordon (he was the one who flew them out of danger in the first place, after all) and he's crushed in the gears of the ark. In fact, quite a few of the people who are responsible, both directly and indirectly, for saving the family are killed, like Woody Harrelson's character, the Russian billionaire and pilot, and the astrophysicist.
And I think one disaster movie cliché that needs to die is how a dog is given more attention than all the people who are dying as if an animal's life is more important than a human's. Again, Independence Day and Dante's Peak are also guilty of this and I didn't like it in those movies either.