Guilty pleasure

Rating: 8/10 (4 March 2010)

This movie is what it is, a terrible mess of CGI, overly dramatic schmaltz and has the honor of being an absurd, high-handed morality play. It's all of these things, but it's great fun. If you want a film with brilliance, depth and well-crafted dialog and a good plot, look elsewhere.
I realize that watching a disaster movie like this, you'll probably be knocked down a few IQ points, be disbarred from Mensa and end up wearing a bib from all the drool, I still enjoyed it. Roland Emmerich is also responsible for other great fiasco's like 'Independence Day',' The Day After Tomorrow' and 'Godzilla' all of which had their fair share of cheese ball, over-the-top effects, throwaway lines and mostly forgettable characters.
There's obviously a market for these types of films, because the movie-going public has been watching the world end in various ways for more than six decades. Up until the last 10 - 15 years though, the effects were usually not the centerpiece and they relied more on the localized, stark emotional after-effects of a major cataclysm than the huge, grand scale of it.
If 2012 was trying to be anything else other than a 'popcorn' film I wouldn't be able to forgive just how unapologetically tacky it all is. Personally, I feel that this was step backward for John Cusack's career, but after seeing other projects in the future, I'm not sure that this was merely one step in a long march into the manure pile of b-movies and/or anything by Uwe Boll.