A disaster with every element

Rating: 1/10 (6 August 2013)

Isn't it poetic? A disaster film is itself a disaster. "2012" is another end of the world/destruction movie that Roland Emerich has become infamous for. Even though his films before were not that great, they did not feel like they had to be force fed to the audience like this film did.
While it has amazing visuals of an earthquake breaking up Los Angeles and several thousand foot tidal waves that toss around Air Force One and the U.S.S John F. Kennedy, the disaster is also with the characters and the story.
The characters are laughably one dimensional and boring. The expression of the family is the same as ours when Gordon or anyone else dies. We're left sitting there going, "Okay, he's dead. No big deal." They expect us to be sad for characters that were more of semi-antagonistic characters and to just be okay over the death of a character we have spent the whole time watching.
The story is nothing more than a coincidence after a coincidence. Yes, other films have coincidences in them to move the plot along like C-3PO and R2-D2 being picked by the Lars Family in "Star Wars", but coincidence is the whole reason for the family's survival. They get a plane and Gordon is luckily a pilot. They fly to Las Vegas where they meet up with our main protagonist Jackson's boss Yuri who will not bring them with until he finds out he needs a second pilot so he has to pick Gordon. They are going to crash land but the earth shifts several thousand miles so they crash right by where the arks are being built and run luckily find a family whose son is on the arc who decide to pick them up. Then, Jackson can luckily hold his breath for ten minutes to dislodge an object that got stuck in the ark's door gear which was preventing the ark from turning on.
The acting is awful as well. Not much else to say with acting but on another note, there is no tension in the film. The escape from Los Angeles basically destroys that because we see how invincible the family is. The second they pull out of their driveway, the earthquake is right behind them and there is not one second where they almost fall into the cracks. The second they leave the road to get around a car with stereotypical slow old ladies driving, the road in front of them falls apart. They manage to dodge a bunch of falling cars and get through a collapsing building with it barely scraping the roof of their car. The closest thing to tension that there is is the plane losing the landing gear in Vegas and then them crash landing because for one second, you think the plane might survive. At least there was about forty-five seconds of tension in the film about the all out destruction of earth.
To add insult to injury, one of the worst lines in cinema history is uttered right at the end of the film.