Oh no the world is ending! Oh no they made a crappy movie out of it!

Rating: 5/10 (16 September 2011)

Half the people I know are obsessed with the world ending. It is almost as if they don't realize that they will be ending with it. The other half doesn't believe it's going to happen. I also like calling them the saner half. What 2012 does is, takes both the halves, fast forwards to 21/12/2012 and presents a highly stylized and dramatized version of what is likely to happen if the former half is proved right.
Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) is the protagonist of this dismal tale. He leads a melancholy divorced life as a writer. Doomsday is approaching. Despite being warned, humans naively believe it to be a farce. About then, the Mayan's get mighty angry and the end of the world begins. There are meteorite strikes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, pregnant Yetis going on a rampage - absolute mayhem. Through this detritus rises Mr. Curtis. He not only decides to save his neck but also takes his ex-wife (Amanda Peet), her new husband (Gordon Silberman) and his children along. And just as in Alive in Wonderland, they leave on a slightly more dangerous adventure dodging skyscrapers, flying airplanes and narrowly missing death 40 million times.
With all the destruction, demolition and chaos, most of the movie plays like a final destination ploy. Then it proceeds to become an apocalyptic survival-adventure flick with feeble attempts at comedy. And therein lays the problem.
Though all the effects, near-death escapes and the idea of Doomsday actually arriving does entertain you, the movie has no substance to back it up. With no solid plot to carry it through, it seems hollow as a bone without the marrow. There has a plethora of movies with such spectacular execution that a plot seemed unnecessary (Kill Bill Vol. 1, Shaun of the Dead) 2012 doesn't execute it very well either. There is a lot of adrenaline pumping stuff, but as the ending credits roll in you can't help but ask an unsatisfied 'What? That's it?'
Nothing extraordinary should be expected from the cast; they aren't the focus of the film. The characters are puppets to be tossed from one misfortune to another. Cusack adopts his trademarked deer-in-the- headlights-of-a-car act that works so well with members of the female contingent. He is the stereotypical heroic front-man, full of kindness, ever the brave-heart and probably smelling of strawberries. You don't want him die for those reasons. The rest of the actors are just there. They bring more to the role than the role brings to them. All of them are just trivial playthings in the larger scheme of events.
Big budget films are usually a visual delight. 2012 follows the trend. The special effects are adroitly done. They seem realistic and instill fear in you. That is probably the highest praise you can attribute to them. The tumultuous adventurous sequences are exciting, but overdone. The main characters people are nearly-killed too many times to seem plausible. It is almost as if Lady Luck and Cusack have a relationship of some sort.
Director Roland Emmerich doesn't seem to be very fond of the Earth as it is. After making Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, among a plethora of others, he strikes back with another 'the world is dying and we are dead meat' movie. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have learned from his previous mistakes.
Though the latter half of the movie drifts away from the main picture, the apocalypse that is, the movie serves its purpose well – spread fear among paranoid people. Viewers were already making wills by the time they left the theater. On pragmatic thinking, it does beg a question. If the world is going to the end in 2012, it seems highly unlikely that the film-makers would have spent all the time, effort and money in making a movie about it.