Roland Emmerich has made record-breaking blockbusters out of the disaster genre, having previously tackled alien invasions, rampaging monsters and more recently, climate change – here’s a director whose only limit to his appetite for destruction is his gargantuan studio budgets.
Cleverly poised for maximum box-office returns, 2012 deals with what is perhaps the final frontier in disaster movies, the end of the world. With no dashing hero or cunning plan to save the day, it’s the destruction of civilisation as we know it and Emmerich spares no expense in graphically committing the end of days to celluloid.
Roughly split into three parts, the first part of 2012 deals with scientist Adrian Helmsley (Ejiofor) in 2009 as he sets forth on notifying the world’s top officials about the impending demise of our planet. Come to 2012 and we see flawed, divorced father Jackson Curtis (Cusack) quickly starting to realise that there’s trouble ahead, and the third part – which deals with the aftermath of the end of modern age.
It’s the second part, helmed by Cusack which is easily the most enjoyable as he narrowly escapes from earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves in his globe-trotting attempts to outrun the apocalypse. The scale of the destruction shown is nothing short of epic – the attention to detail is awe-inspiring, even if at times it’s all feels pretty cheesy and derivative.
Whilst 2012 is shamelessly crowd-rousing, ticking the box of every single cinematic convention going in its attempts to be the ultimate crowd-pleasing blockbuster epic, it’s also hugely unsatisfying. For all the carnage appearing on-screen, you never once feel that Curtis’s family are ever in danger, for every levelled city, there’s a wisecracking quip from our lead actor or a shameless mug to camera from a cute kid. While it’s justified in doing this in its attempt to keep the audience entertained throughout it’s extremely uncomfortable 158 minute run-time, it does this at the expense of allowing any urgency to enter the film and in-turn, for all the excess on display – it starts to get very tedious, very quickly.
2012 is at heart the ultimate b-movie, directed by a showman whose major flaw is that he’s too shamelessly indulgent. At a tight 110 minutes, this would of been the disaster movie to savour, but with its lengthy run-time, there’s not enough meat to bite onto. For all its visual excesses, it lacks heart, depth and intelligence.