Directed by Roland Emmerich


Starring
 John Cusack, Amanda Peet

 

 

 

 

2012

 

Do short titles always make for long, unbearable films?  I would say in this case they do.  Roland Emmerich has made a disaster film in which the entire surface of the Earth is going to be completely remade by forces coming from the sun, and only a select few have any chance to survive it, though of course you and I are not among the lucky few, meaning we have to sit through two and a half hours of it before we can be released.  Okay, here we go:  And believe me, I’m not giving any thing away.

 

Scientists have determined that huge storms on the surface of the sun have heated up the crust of the earth so that by December 2012, all the surface of the planet will be, well, goo.  And hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of earthlings will die.  Naturally the big megillah starts in Los Angeles, as the city falls into the Pacific.  Just ahead of the tragedy, however, a family – maybe I should say a former family, consisting of John Cusack and his former wife, Amanda Peet and their two children, plus her new boyfriend, are having a little spat.  He’s taking the children for a camping trip to Yellowstone – and forget that it’s fifteen hundred miles to get there. 

 

At their old campground  he and the kids discover a Glen Beck type of radio personality talking about the end of the world, and they can see for themselves that what used to be a lake is now a puddle.  Uh-oh.  Meanwhile, back in Washington, the president’s advisors (Oliver Platt and Chiwetel Ejiofor) have known

 

 

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