You Get Your Money's Worth

Rating: 7/10 (11 March 2010)

I've seen all the other Emmerich movies about doomsday-in-America scenarios so I am well acquainted with his methods. This movie gives you plenty of destruction as well as interesting sets and locations. There is the usual plethora of characters from all walks of life and continents, but it is mainly centered around John Cusack's Jackson Curtis, a failed sci fi disaster writer (unlike Emmerich & crew) and his estranged wife, prissy Amanda Peet and two (Hollywood only) kids. There is the requisite rainbow set of scientists, big movers and shakers and a squeaky clean magical Negro White House and President, Danny Glover, who else, who sweats out saccharine, and the rest of the blacks who are uniformly heroic, intelligent and noble. Contrast them to his oily chief of staff Anheuser(Get it Busch?), played by Oliver Platt. Then toss in Woody Harrelsonas some low budget Art Bell dj who is on to the end of the world conspiracy-scenario. See the heads of all the world's governments & the elite know a few years in advance about this, so in Tibet, they build all these escape vessels, arks, for a select group, mainly people with money, 1,000,0000,000 Euros a seat. While the rest of the world is ignorant of this seismic event, caused normally benign neutrinos, emitted by the sun, melting the inside of the planet and crust, that until the crevasses swallow them up or volcanoes bury them in ash or lava, they are ignorant. But Jackson and family find out at the last minute and due to him meeting both the DJ and working for a fat Russian billionaire who has tickets, rushes to get to Tibet with his family in utterly Hollywood only escapes in various planes and vehicles only meters ahead of the collapsing earth surface or falling fireballs. The characters are not totally cardboard, but they are predictable and corny as well as they keep the story moving. There are lots of them including the Russian billionaire, who along with his beautiful Russian model and pilot, die just before safety, leaving only his two fat obnoxious kids to survive. But good old Jackson and his family pull through unscathed to an ending where at least the chosen survive to settle in the one last remaining chunk of land, South Africa. Okay, its corny, over the top, implausible but it follows the mold of hundreds of similar movies and does it better. The best thing is that it hardly touched on the Mayan thing but kept it pseudo Scientific.