This is a ludicrously guilty pleasure of a blockbuster, in which the end of the world is turned into a two and a half hour rollercoaster ride.
You’ve got to hand it to Emmerich – he’s a showman who has a passion for creating spectacles.
The scale of 2012 is awe-inspiring, even though many of the thousands of effects shots are old-fashioned and often cheesy. But if he’s not a perfectionist along James Cameron lines, he knows how to dazzle mass audiences with images and concepts (leaving aside his pedestrian characters and soapy human stories).
The ‘science part’ at the beginning of the movie sees Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), America’s foremost scientist, arriving in India in 2009, where he’s told by a colleague (Jimi Mistry) that the Earth’s core is heating up at a dramatically increased rate.
Within a few years, he says, the core will start to shift, creating devastation on the Earth’s surface. As the Mayans predicted, the world looks like it will come to an end in 2012.
The film’s human component is chiefly occupied by John Cusack. He’s a failed writer called Jackson Curtis, who lives alone in Los Angeles working as the chauffeur for a Russian billionaire. He occasionally sees his kids (Liam James, Morgan Lily) by his ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet), who’s now remarried to Gordon (Thomas McCarthy).
On a weekend with his children in Yellowstone National Park in 2012, Jackson comes across soldiers protecting the park and meets Helmsley, as well as a crazy conspiracy theorist and DJ (Woody Harrelson), who says the end of the world is nigh.
Guess what? Turns out he’s right!
Emmerich goes all out in his destruction of the world as we know it. But in a movie about the end of the world, you can really have nothing but excess.
