Starring: The Planet Earth; Special Guest Appearance by: The State of Wisconsin

Rating: 4/10 (13 November 2009)

2012 (PG-13, 2:38) — SF, biggie, formula
In the end, they all die.
Ha, ha, just kidding. Of course they don't ALL die. Disaster movies are the most formulaic of all formula movies; the formula is that there are about a dozen foreground characters, and only half of them die — you get to guess WHICH half — one at a time, in various colorful ways, usually with the token black guy going 1st. Meanwhile, massive, awful carnage is being wreaked upon all the folx in the background, but you're never invited to care about them, so you don't.
In this film, it's hard enuf to care about the ones in the foreground, since they get so little screen time (despite the movie's whopping 2:38 running length) that they're hard to relate to as individuals. John Cusack plays the main viewpoint character, Jackson Curtis, Amanda Peet is his ex-wife Kate, Tom McCarthy is her new hubby Gordon Silberman, and Liam James and Morgan Lily play kidlets Noah and Lilly. Right off the bat, you know the kids are gonna make it; no director ever kills off the kids, no matter what the provocation (such as that little snot in The Day the Earth Stood Still). That leaves the 3 adults and assorted scientists, government officials, plutocrats, and oddballs as potential sacrifices to The Formula.
30-40 years ago, the master of this genre was Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adeventure, 1972; The Towering Inferno, 1974; Flood!, 1976; Fire!, 1977; The Swarm, 1978; When Time Ran Out , 1980). Director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 1996; Godzilla, 1998; The Day after Tomorrow, 2004) obviously wants to carve out a name for himself as Allen's successor. (But let me recommend one of his non-disaster films, the sadly under-appreciated The 13th Floor, 1999.)
Unlike Allen, tho, Emmerich wants to paint on a bigger canvas — much, much bigger; planet-wide bigger. Thus the special effects, tho technically better than what Allen had available to him, tend to dominate the personalities. Working your way thru a skyscraper or a cruise liner, you've got time to get to know the people next to you. But when everyone's madly scrambling and screaming, with doom nipping at their heels, there isn't much chance for casual conversation.
And scrambling is what they have to do, occasionally pausing for arguments, hesitations, and hugs just long enuf for the current disaster to ALMOST catch up to them. Not to fear, tho, they manage to stay a half-step or split second ahead of each grisly fate. Usually.
Look up the original meaning of the word "incredible" to get a sense for how convincing the many narrow escapes are. Yeah, sure, a guy with 4 pilot lessons under his belt is gonna be able to tilt his 2-engine commercial plane edgewise to slip between 2 toppling buildings (inexplicably headed toward each other and not, as physics would suggest, in the same direction) — suuuuurrre he is, and never get whacked by any of the many chunks of falling concrete, either. And that deal about running out of fuel while you're still over the Pacific? No biggie, we'll just slide this handy continent under you.
We learn in the early going that the proximate cause of all the problems is that solar neutrinos have inexplicably been undergoing a phase shift on their way toward the Earth, and now they're interacting with the Earth's guts to a much greater extent than before. This utter desecration of anything we've ever known about particle physics heats up the crust and precipitates the various resultant natural disasters — notably city-devouring earthquakes and mountain-climbing tsunamis — that form the bulk of the film. At the end of the movie, nobody ever questions whether the phase shift is still occurring and will continue to wreak havoc. The clouds all vanish, the Sun comes out, and everybody's all laffey and smiley, evidently having already forgotten the 6 billion rotting corpses they're sailing over. The Earth's gotten a good scrubbing, and everything's OK now, kids.
Really good FX and several guest appearances by the State of Wisconsin move this by-the- numbers piece up to the bottom of my "up to you" range.