Once upon a time, there was a mediocre filmmaker (but spectacular showman) named Irwin Allen, who produced the seminal disaster films The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Though he had the dramatic sensibilities of a 12-year-old boy, his passion for his work was contagious and audiences loved him.
 

2012: Oh my god! My career! What have I done?

Allen was reincarnated — cinematically, at least — in German-born director Roland Emmerich, whose résumé reveals his personal mission to carry on Allen’s life work. In the late ‘90s, following 1992’s Stargate (arguably his best film), he dazzled (or bludgeoned) audiences with Independence Day and Godzilla before a brief vacation from disaster fantasy with The Patriot. With 2012, Emmerich spends his biggest budget (a reported $250 million) on his most Allen-esque film yet.

The specious story revolves around the ancient Mayan “prediction” that the world will end on Dec. 21st, 2012 (I won’t recount how ridiculous this is). In true Allen fashion, we are introduced to characters, none especially interesting, as they dodge collapsing faultlines, exploding volcanoes and preposterously huge tidal waves, to reach hastily built arks designed to preserve a fraction of humanity (note that these arks are made by the Chinese, not the Americans). Some usually good actors flounder, including John Cusack (1408), Amanda Peet (What Doesn’t Kill You), Thandie Newton (W.), and a particularly bored Danny Glover (Be Kind Rewind) as a clueless President (is there any other kind?).

Yet, there’s true brilliance from Oliver Platt (Frost/Nixon) as a Machiavellian presidential adviser and Woody Harrelson (Zombieland) as a demented radio commentator. Chiwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men), a man I’m convinced will someday win an Oscar, tries valiantly to hold the film together as a scientist wracked by guilt over his complicity in the plot to save the wealthy while keeping the impending disaster secret from the masses. He obviously hasn’t learned anything from the way our government handled the economic meltdown.

That should have been the story — when to tell the world, how to deal with it, who to save — not the action, which is frequently ludicrous. On one hand, I applaud the chutzpah of a director brazen enough to shoot a gigantic high-tech ark being buffeted about the Himalayas by a 25,000-foot tidal wave like a kid’s toy boat in a bathtub, but an early sequence of Cusack tear-assing his way (in a limousine, no less) around L.A. amid collapsing freeways and imploding skyscrapers is so cartoony that it’s more like Emmerich’s channeling Chuck Jones than Irwin Allen (apologies to Jones for the comparison).

I like the metaphorical question: Do you sit in the bowels of the capsized U.S.S. Poseidon and wait for a rescue that will likely never come, or do you proactively struggle to survive even in the face of impossible odds? Emmerich has faint grasp of Allen’s central question, much less the answer, and so the best disaster film is Mimi Leder’s 1998 Deep Impact, which matures Allen’s formula rather than dumbing it down even further. Even Emmerich’s own The Day After Tomorrow was a better film. If not much smarter, it was at least better written and acted.

2012 ★★
PG-13 for intense disaster sequences and some language.
 

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