London,

2012

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Cert: 12A

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Dir: Roland Emmerich. Cast: John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Amanda Peet, Woody Harrelson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, Oliver Platt, Jimi Mistry, Liam James, Morgan Lily, Tom McCarthy

 

Description: Jackson Curtis continues to argue with his estranged wife Kate, who wants a divorce so she can marry her boyfriend Gordon. The couple's two children Noah and Lilly are caught in the crossfire. Disaster strikes and the family home in Los Angeles is destroyed by a series of massive earthquakes which send the whole of the west coast tumbling into the ocean. The survivors fly west, searching for somewhere to land.

Country: US. 2009. 157mins

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Could 2012 be the greatest disaster movie ever?

 

Heroic effort: John Cusack plays a down-at-heel writer who has to struggle to save his family

It is the habit of disaster movies to steal from other disaster movies, but 2012 may be the biggest disaster movie ever made, an awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance.

The film is great to watch, speedily checking off a list of must-haves in the genre: a piece of holy writ predicting the event (the Mayan calendar is due to end in 2012); a crazy disbeliever who thinks everything is going to be fine (the White House chief of staff, played by Oliver Platt); the ordinary guy whose failures are put right when he proves heroic (John Cusack); and the clever scientist who couldn't get anyone to listen (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Director Roland Emmerich introduces a new kind of cast to the disaster genre.

None of them is a genre staple and they all bring a fine plausibility to the story. And the story is really the star in this computer-generated fantasy.

The earth has been slowly microwaving itself for years. As the earth's core heats up, the crust begins to shift, which means giant earthquakes and tsunamis will soon engulf the world's major cities.

Cusack plays Jackson Curtis, a writer and divorced father of two who is driving limousines in the day to cover his costs.

When Los Angeles starts to fall into a hole, Curtis is there to try and save everybody, including his ex-wife's tetchy new boyfriend.

That's the thing about disaster movies: the good ones always bring out the humanitarian in the most hopeless cases.

Meanwhile, the world begins to break apart. Those who thought the trailer was epic should see what happens to Rome and Las Vegas in the final film. I said awesome but what I really meant was AWESOME! You can't take your eyes off the screen.

While Curtis and his family are struggling to survive the cracks in the pavement, moving farther and farther away from home to find safety, the world's bigwigs are (of course) coming up with a secret plan to save humanity.

It's at this point the film goes from being thrilling to being thoughtful, an essential moment in the best disaster flicks.

On what basis will humans qualify to be saved? Surely, it won't just become about the ability to buy your way to safety?

The film engages in a potent satire on the modern manners of oligarchy and the capitalist sense of entitlement - just right for our period of near economic meltdown - and at times you feel you may be watching the most political film of the year.

Of course, in disaster movies as in life, the struggle for survival makes people behave with Darwinian predictability.

There are people in 2012 who look doomed as soon as they express their needs: the needier and more aggressive ones look unlikely to survive.

Beyond that, there is a strong sense that any bits of the world that survive will demand a re-ordering of the planet. The poles will literally shift, and Africa will become the centre of the new world.

In other words, 2012 is an Obama-generation liberal fantasy of staggering proportions, a clean-up exercise where greed and religious hokum get the boot, possibly to be followed at last by the calm fairness that follows the storm. But nothing is certain.

Daft as a brush and brilliant at the same time, it is part of the film's achievement neither to get weighed down by its philosophical issues nor by its special effects.

They work together to make a story that will pass - among the hopeful, the young, the cheerfully liberal and the slightly paranoid - as a great chunk of literal truth masquerading as entertainment.

The film's excitingness is perfectly tuned to the times, and, even at two-and-a-half hours, it doesn't feel a minute too long.

I've been looking back at those disaster movies we grew up on.

The Towering Inferno, where foolish and hubristic men bring about the deaths of people who prove either brave and good or cowardly and selfish.

The same with Jaws - with its rare humour, the sense that the horrifying can also be funny.

Roland Emmerich has been making disaster epics for years - Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow among them - and each has gone a little further, mining new technology and old vulgarity, to bring us what must be the flashiest of them all.

There are lines that will make your skin crawl, but you can't hold that against a disaster movie. John Cusack gives his character an inner life and he brings something touching to the part of Curtis Jackson.

Chiwetel Ejiofor has the kind of talent that dignifies everything he touches, and his good scientist is a model of grace and knowledge under pressure.

Danny Glover as the President makes you believe in the problem, evident throughout this film, of how individuals go about making decisions that will affect the lives of millions.

The film is emboldened with all this human stuff, but ultimately it is the effects that rule. And there is not a second here where they let you down.

If I had seen this when I was a kid I probably would have fainted, such was our susceptibility to a rubber shark or a single burning building.

But people now are inured to gigantic depictions of Things Going Wrong, and you leave the cinema after this film buzzing about how right they got it.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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