Director and co-writer, Roland Emmerich, claims that 2012 will be his last disaster movie where the Earth gets attacked. After sending aliens (Independence Day), giant lizards (Godzilla), and even Mother Nature (The Day After Tomorrow) after us, this is the big finale. And it certainly shows. This is easily the grandest of Emmerich's films in terms of visual spectacle, and the effects are definitely something to see. The script, however, is completely recycled from those earlier films, and should be familiar to just about anyone who's watched one of the previous titles.

As everyone should know, the film is very loosely based on the belief by some that the world is set to end on December 21st, 2012, as predicted by the ancient Mayans. Personally, I think it's an elaborate plot dreamed up by cheapskates who want to weasel out of their Christmas shopping that year, but I digress. Anyone looking for some serious information on this particular end of the world theory would do better looking up one of the numerous websites devoted to the topic. This movie is a live action cartoon, filled with stock characters that have suited Emmerich well in the past, and he obviously sees no reason to mess with tradition. There's the nice guy who's forced to become a hero in his family's hour of need, some cute kids to clutch onto the hero while the world around them goes up in smoke, a pair of bickering old men, a cooky conspiracy theorist whose ideas may not be so crazy after all, shady government officials who desperately try to hide information from the public, and a noble President of the United States who pretty much stares solemnly at everyone around him while patriotic music plays on the soundtrack. Throw in a lot of impressive action sequences, where a lot of faceless extras die, but our heroes remain unharmed, a cute little dog to get a big reaction from the audience when it narrowly escapes danger, and supporting characters who unwisely say things like "I'll be right back" or "I'll be okay" (which means they'll be dead two minutes later or less), and you get the idea.

The hero role is filled in by John Cusack, a likable actor who brings just enough of his screen presence to make his shallow character of Jackson Curtis work. Jackson's a failed sci-fi novelist who now works as a limo driver. As the film opens, he picks up his two kids (Liam James and Morgan Lily) from his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) to take them camping. They arrive at Yellowstone National Park to a surprising number of ominous signs ("The lake's dried up!") and government officials walking about. Jackson also comes across a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist named Charlie Frost, who seems to have been written with Dennis Hopper in mind, but we got Woody Harrelson instead, who does his best Hopper imitation. Charlie tells him about the theory of the world ending on December 21st. Jackson doesn't believe him, but why should he? He wasn't around during the film's opening scenes when a concerned scientist named Adrian (Chiwetel Ejiofor) delivered disturbing findings to the President of the United States (Danny Glover) back in 2009 that evidence from the sun's solar flares and the Earth's crust proves that the world is coming to an end. The President places Adrian and a shifty official named Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) in charge of building arks that can carry select people safely when the time comes.

After almost an hour of build up and tedious exposition, the time finally does come, and we get what we paid to see - The end of the world. Emmerich goes for pure spectacle here, and pulls off some truly impressive sequences, especially the initial big scene when Jackson and his family are speeding down a collapsing California highway as the ground beneath them literally splits and breaks apart. The trailers have unfortunately given away a lot of this scene, but it's still impressive to watch. Buildings topple, fire falls from the sky, the earth sinks, and thousands of extras (both real and digitally created) flee for their lives or fall to their deaths. The move even has time for a cheap laugh or two, such as when Jackson gets stuck driving behind the car of a tiny old lady moving very slowly as the world is literally falling apart behind them. Is it silly and implausible? Oh, hell yes. But it's also the first sign of life the movie has had up to this point. Up until then, I wasn't all that involved. The dialogue was hokey, the characters were stock, and I just didn't care about what was going on. Things pick up a little bit once the special effects kick in, but we still never escape from the stilted dialogue.

This should come as no surprise, but the sole reason to see 2012 is for the effects. The screenplay by Emmerich and composer Harald Kloser (10,000 B.C.) gives us a large number of subplots and characters, but doesn't bother to develop them into anything worth caring about. There's a budding relationship between Adrian and the President's daughter (Thandie Newton) that seems particularly unnecessary, since we already have Jackson and his ex-wife rediscovering their feelings for each other during the crisis to give the movie its romantic angle. Then there's the two old men who work as entertainers on a cruise ship (Blu Mankuma and George Segal), trying to reconnect with their family back on land as the disaster hits. This seems woefully underdeveloped, lacks the emotional punch intended, and could have been removed from the film entirely with no consequence. There's actually a lot here that could have been cut, and made this into a tighter paced movie. In its current form (just over two and a half hours long), there are too many dead spots between the action sequences. The characters aren't strong enough to hold our interest when they're not running for their lives.

While this is certainly not a bad movie, I think that's what did it in for me. I constantly felt a distance between the film and me while I was watching it. I never feared for the characters, or wondered if they were going to make it out okay, since it's pretty easy to tell who will be still alive when the end credits come. (There's only one death late in the film I did not predict.) I also didn't feel for them. I was more interested in what was going on around them, and how the effects artists had pulled it off. That's not to say the actors are disagreeable, although a number of them do go over the top. They know what kind of film they're in, and they give the right amount of effort, but not much more than that. At least they convincingly react to the CG effects all around them, which is really all that's expected of them in a movie like this.
So, 2012 is a total junk food movie that works in some ways, but wears out its welcome. It probably would have been better if the studio had stuck with its original plan to release it over the summer, though. It seems a little out of place with the holiday and Oscar Bait films right around the corner. Still, audiences looking for a cheap thrill will get what they wanted. If that sounds like you, you can bypass this review, buy your ticket, and indulge.

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