2012 – Early in Roland Emmerich’s preposterous new end-of-the-world thriller 2012, a team of art experts with knowledge of the impending global catastrophe are secretly replacing masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa with exact replicas, storing the originals in hopes of preserving our cultural heritage for the post-apocalyptic era to follow. It’s never mentioned which (if any) movies have been marked for survival, but if Emmerich had his way, the complete works of Irwin Allen would probably make the list.

Then again, Emmerich might snub Allen for thinking too small. 2012 is like Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, and The Poseidon Adventure, all wrapped into one, featuring special guest appearances by Airport, Volcano, and Emmerich’s own The Day After Tomorrow. This isn’t disaster porn, it’s a disaster gang-bang. The countdown begins in present-day India, where geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) learns of the imminent solar activity that will cause the earth’s core to overheat, resulting in massive tectonic plate shifts, polar reversal, dogs and cats living together, and the end of all life as we know it.

Before long, a massive hush-hush effort is underway to build enormous arks capable of sustaining the human race — or at least, those members of the human race able to afford the billion-dollar boarding passes. That’s a group that decidedly doesn’t include Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), failed novelist, failed husband, and failed dad, who stumbles upon the cover-up while vacationing with his kids in Yellowstone Park. Curtis gathers up his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), and her current squeeze, Gordon (Tom McCarthy), for a race against time, trying to reach the arks even as the world crumbles around them.

To Emmerich’s credit, he delivers some of the best world-crumbling money can buy. Those who enjoyed his destruction of recognizable landmarks in his previous work will be delighted to learn he was just getting warmed up. Every ten minutes brings a new cataclysm: Yellowstone is engulfed by volcanic lava, Los Angeles tumbles into the sea, an aircraft carrier demolishes the White House, and on and on it goes. Emmerich and his digital artistes attend to every little detail, so you can just make out the screaming office drones hanging from girders and dropping to their doom as two skyscrapers collapse into each other.

But who cares about those people anyway? 2012 is all about how the end of the world aids John Cusack’s personal growth as a husband and father — and he and his family are just so adorable together, you can’t help but think it was all worth it. Presumably that’s how Emmerich sees it, anyway, but for most of us, 2012 can best be appreciated as an unintentional comedy. Woody Harrelson nails the appropriate tone with his Dennis-Hopper-on-angel-dust performance as a conspiracy theorist who was right all along. This is the $200 million movie Ed Wood never got the chance to make.



Pirate Radio — Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as The Count, a DJ who keeps rock and roll alive in 1960s England by broadcasting illegally from a ship in the North Sea. Bill Nighy is the ship’s owner and Kenneth Branagh is the stuffed shirt trying to shut them down.



Fantastic Mr. Fox — Apparently even Wes Anderson has gotten to the point where all his films are starting to look alike to him. Hence this stop-motion animated rendition of the children’s book by Roald Dahl about three farmers plotting to rid themselves of crafty Mr. Fox (George Clooney), who’s been stealing their chickens to feed his family.



The Messenger — Woody Harrelson (him again!) and Ben Foster are a pair of soldiers tasked with the unenviable mission of informing next of kin that their loved ones have been killed in Iraq.

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