2012 — Review

Not satisfied with having just one eco-disaster movie on his resume, Roland Emmerich dealt out plentiful cinematic devastation with his bombastic disaster opus, 2012. Epic in scale and visual scope, there’s something oddly cathartic about seeing entire cities sink into the ocean while the ground bubbles and breaks into pieces, and that’s what 2012 delivers. It’s a piece driven entirely by spectacle over story, visual prowess over character depth and the destructive force of nature unbridled over nuanced thematic environmentalism.

2012 is a series of explosive set pieces, with Emmerich abandoning spatial logic to move his characters from place to place like chess pieces, ignoring the laws of physics to move from one action sequence to the next. Additionally, the characters are plainly drawn, mostly archetypal and without emotionally connective tissue. Emmerich roots the plot in the 2012 Mayan calendar cultural phenomenon and the promise of extinction-level carnage, using flashy VFX as an elaborate set dressing. Every other aspect is superfluous—2012 is a movie that concerns itself with the what and the how, but certainly not the who.