By Jim Schembri
(M) ★★★★
(151 minutes)
General release
WITH 2012, director Roland Emmerich, the maestro of mass destruction responsible for ID4 and The Day after Tomorrow, delivers a great, big, fat, stupid, greasy cheeseburger of a movie designed to show, in vivid detail, what the end of human civilisation will look like according to his vast army of brilliant visual effects artists. And it's a splendour to behold.
Society's trouble begins when the sun misbehaves in a way that upsets the delicate balance of the Earth's core. This then destabilises the Earth's crust, which produces an escalating and singularly attractive series of earthquakes, eruptions and tsunamis that destroy cities, demolish bridges and show mountain-dwelling monks what gnarly surf conditions look like.
Leading the fun is failed author Jackson Curtis (a pleasantly hammy John Cusack) who wrote a worst-selling book that predicted all this magnificent mayhem.
He, of course, has a failed marriage and children he doesn't see enough. Luckily, the stress of trying to out-run Armageddon, which often appears to be targeting him personally, teaches him real values.
Over at the White House, science adviser Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, the most versatile actor alive) is caught up in the scurry to save a sample of humanity, a job given to wise-cracking presidential aide Carl Anheuser (a very funny Oliver Platt).
Though the future of the planet is at stake, he is at one with the audience and the director in refusing to take the whole thing seriously.
2012 is, at heart, an old-school disaster film that closely follows the template set by Irwin Allen's classic 1974 disaster pic The Towering Inferno.
It's easy to mock throwaway blockbusters like 2012, but as enthralling, mindless entertainment, the film is difficult to fault.
Why carp about a movie that offers you a photo-realistic depiction of an aircraft carrier tumbling over the Washington Monument?