18.0°

'2012'

Columbia Pictures

2 hours, 38 minutes

Disaster movies, as a genre, are not necessarily high-calibre art, but I have a fondness for them nevertheless. It's not the high body count or the tragedy that's attractive, but rather the intense emotional situations that arise -- the heights (and depths) characters will achieve to survive. Sure, it's melodramatic, but these movies are meant to be fun, with relatively broad performances.

The best of these films are the ones that play it straight, and don't try to add extraneous violence to the mix. The worst play it for laughs, too self-aware of the inherent silliness of the plot, and often want to up the ante by throwing in a serial killer or the like.

"2012," this week's end-of-the-world epic, isn't the best I've ever seen, but it's entertaining enough to keep you going through the sillier portions of its two-and-a-half hour run time.

True to the genre, "2012" includes a whole host of characters and a slew of stars, mostly B-level, with at least one A-lister thrown in for prestige.

A name you may not recognize, though a face you probably will, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays geologist Adrian Helmsley who, while conferring with colleagues in India, discovers that, for some unexplained reason, a rare planetary alignment and extreme solar flares is causing the earth's crust to destabilize. Uh oh.

The magic date is November 21, 2012, which just happens to be the date of Armageddon picked by the Mayans thousands of years ago. Coincidence? Who knows, because a disaster movie with this kind of scope, the destruction of the entire planet, has no time to explore ancient prophecies or obscure scientific theories.

Moving on, we are introduced to John Cusack as Jackson Curtis, a washed-up fiction writer trying to reconnect with his estranged family. Also in attendance are Amanda Peet, as his wife, Woody Harrelson as a nutty conspiracist, Danny Glover as the President, Oliver Platt as the National Science Advisor, and Thandie Newton as the Pres' daughter. As things start to fall apart, and I do mean fall apart, it will be these characters, plus several more, whose stories play out against the backdrop of total destruction.

Though I enjoyed the film, I was irritated by several elem-ents. Director Roland Emmerich, who made one good movie, "Independence Day," followed by a series of bad ones, i.e. "The Day After Tomorrow," and "10,000 B.C.," certainly has the formula down. The good, the bad, and the ugly all collide, stories intertwining, as cities fall around them. Emmerich has a great eye for captivating scenes of destruction, but, unfortunately, a poor sense of how far the public's disbelief can be suspended, and often pulls me out of the story with one ridiculous scene or another.

Here's an example: If you tell me that neutrinos colliding inside the Earth's core are going to cause Yellowstone to erupt into a giant volcano and California to slide off into the ocean, I say fine. I don't know anything about planetary geology or astrophysics, so OK, whatever, I'll buy your premise for the purpose of the story.

I do, however, know a little about the physics of a beat-up, 20-year-old RV, and I know it can't dodge fireballs and leap 50-foot crevasses. I also don't buy that a guy with two or three flying lessons under his belt can weave a lear jet between falling buildings, dodging debris and flying street cars alike.

All of the aforementioned images look cool -- the volcano, the earthquakes, the plane, etc., and I think that's what Emmerich is focused on. But just because something looks cool doesn't mean it's in any way believable. That's action for action's sake, and it's a mistake.

I was also disappointed at the lack of depth employed in the film. Granted, depth kind of goes against the grain in a movie like this, but I'm actually really interested in the Mayan prophecy, and I wanted more about it in this movie.

I don't believe the world will end on the winter solstice of 2012, but it's interesting that these ancient peoples developed this sophisticated calendar with such lengthy time periods. According to the Mayans, 2012 is the end of a "great year," an epoch spanning tens of thousands of years.

If I'm not mistaken, the Mayans don't actually say the world will end, but that it will have a new beginning. Fascinating to contemplate, but aside from stealing the basest element of their theory, the filmmakers spend no time exploring the roots of the Mayans' idea.

Disaster movies come in two classes, those where the world is being destroyed by some kind of animate threat, i.e. "Independence Day" or "War of the Worlds," and those where the world is being destroyed by a natural event like "Deep Impact," "Armageddon," or "2012."

When the humans eventually defeat the aliens in the first class of DM, it makes sense -- after all, creatures from another world are living things that can be beaten, either by our wits or our microbes.

But in the second class, I hate it when, at the last minute, someone always figures out a way to blow up the meteor or stop the earthquake with a suitcase full of plutonium. That just doesn't make sense. If the solar system decides to scrape us off the surface of this planet, that's it. No last ditch effort is going to make a difference.

In that sense I appreciated "2012's" fatalism. There's no way to save the Earth, so let's figure out how to save ourselves instead. Of course the filmmakers can't resist some kind of unrealistic happy ending, but at least it's better than Bruce Willis with a nuclear bomb.

Grade: B-

"2012" is rated PG-13 for frightening scenes of mass destruction and some language.

Chris Jenness is a freelance graphic designer, artist and movie buff who lives in Nikiski.