SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Solar flares or something are causing polar shifts and the world is ending (again); all you need to know is that something is happening and it's gonna fuck up your shit. It takes forever and a day to finally get rolling with some provocative ideas, but show it patience and Roland Emmerich's 2012 ends up being pretty interesting. It is, for all intents and purposes, the same film as Emmerich's last big-budget disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow, only told with less maudlin drama and perhaps a little more understanding of its own implications. Maybe the inarguable failure of his putrid, self-serious 10,000 BC knocked a bit of sense into Emmerich. Maybe the guy who became infamous for vaporizing the White House found himself behind the times, given that Armageddon looms closer for everyone these days. Whatever the case, Emmerich injects a familiar scenario with much-needed gallows humour--his intentions stated up-front by a crudely-produced Flash animation that explains the forthcoming doomsday and acts as a rather painfully obvious metaphor for the film itself. "Draw 'em in with humour," the cartoon's paranoid creator (Woody Harrelson) tells us, "then really make 'em think." That said, 2012 too often fancies itself a comedy of apocalyptic errors à la Dr. Strangelove or Mars Attacks! when it doesn't have much taste for absurdity. What it does have is a pretty good grasp on the impermanence of human constructs, and that helps immensely when it comes time to question the import of its images. Does it seem a trifle snide and sociopathic, for example, to treat the destruction of Hollywood like the old Earthquake attraction at Universal Studios? See, it's not really the populace of Hollywood that's placed in mortal peril, but the very concept of Hollywood--and, if it must fall, maybe it's better to see it fall as a cheap theme-park attraction than by the hand of some indifferent CGI tornado.

2012's statements about itself extend to its standard ensemble casting. These days, when you hire John Cusack as your unlikely action hero, you're making certain concessions--is there anyone out there who sincerely doubts that Cusack is going to survive the end of days? Not to mention that he's been transparently cast as a protagonist with an implicit degree of immortality: a failed sci-fi writer-turned-absent dad straight out of Stephen King. When our brave Mr. Cusack derides a Governor Schwarzenegger look-alike as an actor!--and therefore someone not to be trusted in times of disaster--2012 shakes the line separating fantasy and reality so thoroughly that it demands participation. Nearly everything about this exercise, right down to the buzz surrounding the projected 2012 apocalypse, is informed by media hype, thus when you have actors decrying actors (who are in turn playing actors) as untrustworthy, it invites a little introspection about where you'll be when the big one hits. The chips are down and the barbarians are at the gates: who can you trust?

Indeed, while 2012 certainly has explosions to spare, it's more concerned with the implosion of civilization. "Is that the Eiffel Tower?" a pilot remarks as his plane clips the analogous landmark in Las Vegas. It's a disturbing moment, because it still represents the loss of something vital to our humanity--with cultural context quickly lost to the chaos, it might as well be the real Eiffel Tower.^* (The question echoes an earlier moment in which the "Mona Lisa" is quietly replaced in the Louvre by an exact duplicate.) A crack running through "The Creation of Adam" is probably the least subtle image in a film devoid of subtlety, but therein lies the tacit understanding that Man, left to his own devices, will attempt to salvage his individuality while the rest of the world scrambles to do the same. As the tide rises, tickets are bought and sold for the makeshift arks that will carry humanity to safety, opening the floor to a difficult debate about who lives and who dies. Meanwhile, the President's daughter (Thandie Newton), placed in charge of salvaging our artistic masterpieces, idly wonders what part those who aren't named Da Vinci or Picasso will play in their brave new world. It's a direct counterpoint to The Day After Tomorrow in that sense--the earlier film's paean to the Gutenberg Bible is placed against 2012 and its obsession with the no-names who comprise the rest of human culture.

No wonder the film spends so much time on extraordinarily personal tragedies and the hopes beyond hope: for every major action set-piece or dumb joke about how "it's not the end of the world," find a declaration of love that arrives moments too late, or a child's wish that his divorced father get along with the replacement dad. The needs of the many rarely outweigh the needs of the few in movies like this, but I positively adore how 2012's climax creates a fatal division between its lovable protagonists and the millions of faceless people who serve as cannon fodder. The safety of one group is, quite literally, tied to the destruction of the other; the fact that both parties eventually get out (mostly) unscathed is hardly a consolation--the reassembly of the nuclear family, it seems, must come at the cost of countless lives, among them husbands and father figures who may be more suitable for those roles than John Cusack. In this respect, 2012 makes for a fine companion piece to John Hillcoat's shaky adaptation of The Road.

And what about the designated "monster" of the piece (Zlatko Buric), a conniving rich asshole dismissed from the movie with a crowd-pleasing middle finger but killed whilst hoisting his children to safety? It's that much harder to reach any concrete conclusions. Just as they always have, Pollyanna scientists clash with harshly-realistic government agents as they attempt to save as many people as possible, yet this time, no one has any distinct moral advantage. Sure, there are plenty of passionate speeches on the indomitability of the human spirit, but the question of who gets left behind remains open-ended enough to make for terrifying contemplation. (Although the construction of the arks is delegated to China, there are no rescue plans for the thousands of Chinese workers. This is precisely what The Day After Tomorrow was grasping at with its mass-evacuation to Mexico.) Sure, the film is big, loud, and, most of the time, pretty stupid--but it also presents a landscape where the only real villains are impossible decisions and the only real heroes are those who go down with the ship.-Ian Pugh

*Similarly, when we cut away from a capsizing cruise liner to watch a supercarrier flatten Washington D.C., can you really say there's any difference between the two vessels? return

Disc 2 contains a Java-based "Interactive Mayan Calendar" (think early Mexican horoscope) and its expository accompaniment "Mysteries of the Mayan Calendar" (3 mins.), five deleted scenes (5 mins. in toto, 1080p) that would've mostly belaboured the already-drawn-out climax, and a slew of featurettes. In "Designing the End of the World" (26 mins., 1080p), Emmerich talks of his long-delayed reunion with ID4 effects maestro Volker Engel, whereupon we meet the usual mix of bluescreen jockeys, one of whom demonstrates a "car cannon," i.e., a gun that shoots cars. Later, a car cannon is retrofitted to fire simulated lava rocks, but this proves as inefficient as it is dangerous. For what it's worth, I really liked Tom McCarthy's take on having to react to tennis balls and tape marks on the floor: he basically says actors shouldn't complain about stuff like that because mental projection is what they're trained to do from the start. Next comes "Roland Emmerich: The Master of the Modern Epic" (9 mins., 1080p), in which the cast and crew of 2012 send so much hyperbolic praise Emmerich's way that I have to think they're softening the blow for a terminal diagnosis. Visual Effects Supervisor Marc Weigert weirdly brings up "V" to celebrate ID4's innovativeness (to paraphrase, it's not ripping off if you go bigger), while Emmerich himself gets the last word, a hollow promise that 2012 will be the last disaster movie he ever makes. Pseudoscience rules the day in "Science Behind the Destruction" (13 mins., 1080p) and a 2012-themed instalment of the program "Countdown to the Future" (22 mins., 1080i), facilitating many a doom-laden forecast from a shared batch of wide-eyed, mouth-breathing hysterics. (They know we're toast because Google told them.) As I type this, of course, Chilé is recuperating from an 8.8 earthquake and Hawaii is on tsunami alert, so maybe I should give these would-be Exidors the benefit of the doubt. "The End of the World: The Actor's Perspective" (8 mins., 1080p) is superfluous in light of McCarthy's aforementioned observation, but perhaps you'll enjoy Emmerich's further mangling of the English language as he refers to Thandie Newton as a "which" rather than a "who." Finally, there's Wayne Isham's cliché-ridden video for Adam Lambert's tie-in song "A Time for Miracles"--itself supplemented with a making-of (3 mins., 1080p) best described as "for Lambert completists only." Previews for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, This Is It, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, and "Breaking Bad" crown the special features. A DVD-based Digital Copy of the film occupies a third slot in the doublewide keepcase.-Bill Chambers

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STARGATE

INDEPENDENCE DAY

GODZILLA

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

10,000 BC