Life is simple in Emmerich’s films. Confronted with unprecedented perils on a scale never before seen, the characters in his disaster epics manage to reaffirm their broken loves, make amends for slipshod parenting, and, most impressively, outrun fireballs and certain death with their hides and wits intact. This is true whether the peril comes from a sudden influx of illegal aliens (Independence Day), a pregnant and irradiated escapee from Ishiro Honda’s nightmares (Godzilla), or nature run amok (The Day After Tomorrow, which, handily, also appears to double as a flip-book condensation of Al Gore’s nightmares). Cinematic catharsis of this sort is probably necessary and certainly entertaining and is based on a series of melodramatic tropes understood and undertaken by everyone from Cecil B. DeMille to Ray Harryhausen to Irwin Allen. The German-born Emmerich takes the disaster-movie genre to its logical conclusion in 2012, obliterating or reconfiguring vast swaths of the planet’s surface (solar storms boil the Earth’s core; tectonic havoc ensues) and providing a 158-minute thrill ride that zips by like the real thing. Over the duration, there are homages (or lifts) to apocalyptic exercises of decades past (particularly producer George Pal’s terrific 1951 When Worlds Collide, which – ha! – is currently being remade by Stephen Sommers) and plenty of cheeky references to Emmerich’s own résumé. Cusack plays beleaguered writer Jackson Curtis. Separated from his wife (Peet) and kids (James, Lily), he stumbles across Harrelson’s conspiracy theorist/wild-eyed prophet Charlie Frost while on a dad-weekend visit to Yellowstone National Park. (At this point in his career, Harrelson deserves some sort of genre-spanning award for the 2009 triple threat of Zombieland, The Messenger, and 2012.) Cut to the White House, where ultranoble President Wilson (Glover) and his squirrelly Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Platt) are already way ahead of the masses – they’ve known about the end of the world for a while now – and from there to myriad subplots and secondary characters as disaster looms and, well, you pretty much know the drill by now. 2012 is PTSD – Popcorn Thrills and Sappy meloDrama – supersized to counter current collective real-world terrors, and it is, by turns, thrilling, ridiculous (the script, by Emmerich and longtime co-writer Harald Kloser, is riddled with howlingly goofy lines and seriously improbable deus-ex-machina moments), and just plain big, dumb fun. Where else are you going to get a chance to see the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy drift down the side of a mile-high tsunami and take out the White House? Big. Dumb. Fun.
This article appears in November 13 • 2009.