2012 features earthquakes, towering infernos, crumbling airports and upside-down cruise ships: in other words, it’s pure ’70s-event-movie nostalgia, just like all of Roland Emmerich’s other ensemble apocalyptos. The director’s shtick of TV-scale human drama foregrounded against crumbling CGI end-days panoramas is now familiar enough to constitute its own sub-genre, right down to the de rigeur dog-in-peril sequence.
A rather haggard-looking John Cusack stars as Jackson Curtis (is the name a Fiddy homage?), a failed science-fiction writer who is also apparently the only civilian in LA smart enough to locate a plane when California slides into the ocean like the mystics and statistics — and the Mayans — said it would. His mad, semi-estranged-family-in-tow dash for higher ground is crosscut with scenes of the world’s elite — including President Danny Glover — organizing the clandestine, Noah’s Ark–style evacuation of those with the means to buy their freedom.
The sheer over-amped tackiness of the whole two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza is best summed up by Adam Lambert’s closing-credits track “Time For Miracles.” Just as 2012 tops (if that’s the word) Armageddon in the shock-and-awe department, Lambert’s power ballad makes Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” sound like Yo La Tengo.