Few filmmakers destroy the planet with as much unabashed glee as Roland Emmerich.
In his previous films, he has eradicated the White House (“Independence Day”), the Statue of Liberty (“The Day After Tomorrow”) and Matthew Broderick’s career (“Godzilla”).
Now comes “2012,” which can only be described as the ne plus ultra of Roland Emmerich disaster pictures. For nearly two hours and 40 minutes, the director stages earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. He reduces Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington and even Vatican City to rubble.
This movie’s idea of a moment of repose finds Woody Harrelson standing on a hilltop in Yellowstone National Park, howling with awe as fireballs rain down upon him.
In short, “2012” is overwrought and overproduced, an orgy of Hollywood excess and incoherence. It’s also among the most entertaining movies you’ll see this year. Emmerich (who co-wrote the screenplay with Harald Kloser) is smart enough not to take any of this very seriously; and he combines the old-fashioned showmanship of ’70s disaster classics like “The Poseidon Adventure” and “Airport” with gorgeously supple 21st- century digital effects.
The movie opens with a series of brisk, globe-trotting scenes: In India, circa 2009, an American geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers that the Earth’s core will soon begin to melt — an apocalypse that the Mayans predicted centuries ago. The geologist races back to the United States to alert the president (Danny Glover) and his sniveling adviser (Oliver Platt), and a plan is hatched to build arks that will enable humanity to carry forth.
Three years later, on an ordinary weekend for fledgling novelist and divorced dad Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), he and his two children stumble upon a cordoned-off section of Yellowstone. A deejay (Harrelson) broadcasting from a nearby trailer insists that the end of days is nigh.
Before it’s all over, we will also meet a corrupt Russian businessman (Zlatko Buric), the president’s art-loving daughter (Thandie Newton), Jackson’s ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her plastic-surgeon husband (Tom McCarthy), and even two old bluesmen (George Segal and Blu Mankuma) playing their last gig on a cruise ship. There are so many people running around, you wonder if Emmerich really does think the world is about to end and is trying to give everyone in Hollywood one last role.
Yet the overstuffed cast feels all of a piece with this overstuffed movie, which leaps from explosion to explosion and one ludicrous race against the clock to the next. First, Jackson and his family must escape L.A. by car, then charter a plane, then fly to Vegas, then link up with another set of travelers, then crash-land in the Chinese mountains, then … well, you get the idea.
You could probably gripe that, even grading on a cheese curve, “2012” turns a little too idiotic. You could even legitimately complain that the cerebral and reserved Cusack looks ill at ease trying to hold such a ridiculous concoction together. It’s never clear what point Emmerich is trying to make: Is he trying to say that man’s disrespect of the environment and for his fellow man is causing the Earth to rot from its core — or that apocalypse is inevitable no matter how we behave?
But you’ll likely be laughing too hard to care. For a movie about the end of the world, “2012” pulses with a goofy sort of life.
Emmerich goes so far over the top that he achieves a kind of trash divinity: “2012” turns out to be one of the most purely pleasurable guilty pleasures ever made.
“2012.”
PG-13 for intense disaster sequences and some language. 2 hours, 40 minutes. Directed by Roland Emmerich; written by Harald Kloser and Emmerich; photography by Dean Semler; starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Tom McCarthy, Woody Harrelson and Danny Glover. Opens today at area theaters.
