The ancient Mayans predicted that a world cataclysm would occur on the winter solstice in 2012, and so have enough conspiracy theorists to spur a swelling industry of doomsday books and TV shows. In the new thriller 2012, those lunar or just lunatic prophesies come true. “It’s kind of galling,” says a previously skeptical White House pooh-bah , “when you realize that the nutbags with the cardboard signs were right all along.”
The nutbag with the $250 million budget is director and co-writer Roland Emmerich, who for all his deficiencies as a teller of stories and wrangler of actors can never be accused of thinking small. In Independence Day he had Martians attack Earth; in The Day After Tomorrow, global warming triggers an instant ice age. He is both the king of disaster porn and a sentimental litist: his movies kill off billions of humans so that one family can get back together. Emmerich tinkers with Darwin’s law so that it’s the survival of the top-billed.
Chugging laboriously on several parallel tracks, the movie starts with noted scientist Adrian Helmsley trying to get news of the bleak 2012 scenario to higher-ups, including President Thomas Wilson . Several billionaires are asked to contribute their fortunes to some mysterious endeavor that will save the world, or possibly just themselves. Meanwhile, on a peak in Yelllowstone Park, a crazy radio prophet is warning of an imminent Armageddon. And failed novelist Jackson Curtis is reunited with his ex-wife and two kids while they barely avoid the catastrophes befalling virtually everyone else on the planet. You’ll quickly glean that Jackson’s job is to be an ordinary guy who evolves into an end-of-days Messiah.
2012 — and by the way, how is the title to be pronounced? Two thousand twelve ? Twenty-twelve? Two-zero-one-two? — is a dead-serious hoot. In some scenes, when folks are spouting dewy end-of-days sentiments as if they’re contending for the Couldn’t Be More Noble prize, you’ll need to stitch your lips together to keep from laughing out loud. The movie dawdles when straining to make the cardboard characters become flesh and blood. Why bother? That’s not what we’re here for; we want to see what the end of the world looks like, in case we’re not around for the real thing.
