It’s the end of John Cusack’s career as we know it in this apocalyptic yawnathon
2012, as predicted by the Mayans, is the year the world will end. Solar flares have boiled the Earth’s core, unleashing a cataclysm of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis that threaten to ravage the planet’s landmass like so much pie crust. Down on ground zero is Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a divorced LA writer whose camping weekend with the kids turns into an epic battle to get his family to safety.
At the helm of this juggernaut is Hollywood’s master of disaster Roland Emmerich, the man behind box office leviathans like Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC.
Sadly, the most spectacular thing about 2012 is quite how, armed with a blank-cheque budget, Emmerich has managed to mould his earth-shattering subject matter into something so prosaic and uninvolving.
The wheels start to come off early on, as the Curtis clan make their escape by car and plane from a crumbling LA. In the hands of a Spielberg this would be heart-in-mouth stuff, as all around the fleeing family roads rupture, skyscrapers buckle and chasms gape. But this is conveyor-belt calamity: as the world gives way beneath them, a hair’s-breadth from death, all Cusack and co can muster is a series of goofy “woooah!” reaction shots. There’s no real sense of danger or consequence. Even the CGI seems phoned-in.
Like its predecessors, 2012 invites us to take a perverse pleasure in witnessing the flimsy constructs of our civilisation topple, symbols of a global system as vulnerable to the avarice of bankers as it is to terrorist attack. Like the resurgence of the horror genre, the return of the disaster movie signals a new age of anxiety for modern audiences. It’s as if we feel ourselves to be living in a world of perpetual imminent collapse, captive to the opaque whims of government and insecure in the knowledge that the rich will always sell us out.
Sure enough, in 2012 the world’s elite buy themselves tickets to safety, leaving the rest of humanity to face unthinkable carnage. To offset this disconsolate message, the film feeds us a miniature morality play – apocalypse is the occasion for Cusack’s failed American father to gain redemption by saving his family from dysfunction and the rival claims of an interloper (his wife’s plastic surgeon boyfriend, played by Thomas McCarthy).
Along the way, Emmerich throws in some spurious emoting, as characters we barely know or care about say tremulous long-distance goodbyes to family members, mere moments before being swept to their deaths by gargantuan walls of water.
John Cusack looks decidedly sheepish throughout and decides to keep his head down as much as one can when one is the protagonist of a blockbuster. Meanwhile Woody Harrelson hams it to high heaven as a crazed conspiracy theorist, and Danny Glover as the President seems content to offer his services as a poor man’s Morgan Freeman.
Insulting in its emotional cheapness and bogus morality, 2012 is the end of the world as a sanctified Disney ride. Worse still, it’s a barely competent exercise that fails to deliver the goods even on its own terms.
Still, the sea looks cool.
