Lessons of Darkness: 2012 (2009): D

2012 may be the dimmest, most clichéd, most simultaneously maudlin and callous big-ticket film of the year, a dunderheaded end-of-the-world special-effects extravaganza that stands as the defining entrant in, and the nadir of, the disaster porn genre. Roland Emmerich’s epic slab of cinematic compost concerns the planet’s destruction in 2012, the date that the Mayans predicted such a cataclysm would take place. Thanks to some Indian research studies, do-gooder geologist Adrian (Chiwetel Ejiofor) learns of Earth’s impending fate and counsels his pragmatic (i.e. cretinous) boss Carl (Oliver Platt) as well as the noble President (Danny Glover) that the world will soon cease to exist thanks to solar flares, an overheating planet core, and massive earthquakes and tidal waves. While Adrian and Carl bicker over whether to inform the populace at large about the coming events, science fiction writer Jackson (John Cusack) – whose book, wouldntchaknow, is being read by Adrian – reunites with his estranged wife and two kids while trying to escape an exploding Yellowstone National Park and a California crumbling and sliding into the sea. Along the way, Emmerich pulls out all the moldy, idiotic dramatic tropes he can muster (fathers mending fences with, and saying goodbye to, sons; altruists facing tsunami deaths head-on; sacrificial acts of heroism; global landmarks getting smashed to pieces; etc.) without even pretending to plausibly dramatize them.

2012’s scripting is so lame that it makes the director’s prior works of moronic national monument destruction (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) look like the collected works of Chaucer in comparison. Emmerichs’s spectacle is meant to be Big Dumb Fun, but its excessiveness – which would have been perfect for 2009’s chosen techno-craze, 3D – isn’t exhilarating as much as embarrassingly campy, a series of do-or-die scenarios that have little tether to reality in a narrative or visual sense, and seem designed only to further the director’s favored unreal digitized aesthetic. Clocking in at a borderline-insulting 158 minutes, the film is emotionally manipulative about its in-dire-straits protagonists’ fates to an egregious extent. And yet despite an affected interest in human survival, goodness and selflessness, it exploits panoramas of mass death for horrifying kicks to the point that the action proves downright heartless, and its syrupy bathos disingenuous and maddening. Still, considering its corniness, inanity, and wrongness – which extends to the story’s celebration of bad sci-fi as a moral exemplar and its contention that crisis can cure familial tensions and (in a laughable subplot) kids’ bedwetting – 2012 does manage, from catastrophic start to Noah’s Ark finale, to be accidentally uproarious, though its efforts to be the archetypal disaster film are so thoroughly achieved that one can only hope the genocidal genre has now reached its own end date.