It's the end of the world, but not the end of movie-making, as some would speculate...

Rating: 10/10 (13 June 2010)

"2012" is the 2009 disaster epic from the "master of disaster" Roland Emmerich ("Independece Day" - his best film, in my opinion; "Godzilla"; and "The Day After Tomorrow"). Whether you love him or loathe him, "2012" is his disaster epic, with plenty of spectacular scenes of destruction, a determined band of survivors (led by John Cusack as struggling writer Jackson Curtis) trying to live through the end of the world. Some scientific babble about the sun's rays heating up the Earth's core and loosening up the Earth's tectonic plates and shifting the poles has sped up doomsday from its predicted date (by the Mayans) of 12-21-12 to some time during the summer of 2012. Scenes of destruction are nothing new in movies like this. But what makes it all so very different is that the destruction on the scale as presented in "2012" is unprecedented in the movies. The scenes of mega-tsunamis engulfing Washington, D.C., and India, the super-volcano underneath Yellowstone National Park suddenly erupting, and Los Angeles (and pretty much the entire West Coast falling into the Pacific Ocean) are not only spectacular and awesome to look at, but are also harrowing and horrifying. I'm not a fan of the disaster movie genre, but the scenes of such mass death and destruction in "2012" are so unusually affecting and horrifying that I actually had a hard time watching it, but I couldn't look away. I don't know if that was intended or not by Emmerich, but if he wanted to scare the hell out of the audience, I think that in my case he succeeded in shaking me to my emotional core, and wondering if this is what the end of the world will really look like. While I don't think the world will end on 12-21-12 - I've read enough articles and discussions on the matter to convince me otherwise - there is no question, however, that "2012" may very well be the disaster epic of the disaster movie genre.
10/10