2012

Roland Emmerich has ended the world with aliens in Independence Day (1996) and with weather in The Day After Tomorrow (2004). In 2012 he does it with the planet itself. We go to Emmerich films to watch cities fall over, and for about an hour 2012 does that as well as it has ever been done. The trouble is that it runs 158 minutes, and once the cities are down it has no clear idea what to do with the people who were standing in them.

The Los Angeles escape is the reason to see it. Jackson Curtis collects his children, his ex-wife and her boyfriend in a limousine as the ground opens, and for ten minutes the car threads between falling office blocks and a street that tips sideways towards the Pacific. Dean Semler shoots it in hard California daylight, with no night and no smoke to hide behind. Then a light aircraft takes off from a runway breaking up beneath it and flies at roof level through a city sliding into the sea. We laughed out loud, and it was admiring laughter. Each disaster arrives half a second after the car has passed, and the timing is so exact that the sequence becomes slapstick with a budget.

Yellowstone is nearly as good, and better acted. Woody Harrelson’s Charlie Frost broadcasts from a camper van, lives on pickles, and greets the eruption of the largest volcano on the continent as the best day of his life. Shay Cunliffe gets him right at a glance, bucket hat and a vest with too many pockets. When the caldera goes, in a wall of black ash that fills the sky behind him, it is the one moment where the spectacle and a human being point the same way. The loudest thing in the film is not Harald Kloser and Thomas Wander’s score, all brass and timpani, but the rumble under that eruption, which we felt in the seat.

Then everyone has to get to China, and the people start to matter, and this is where it goes wrong. Emmerich and Kloser’s script gives Jackson a divorce, two children and a book nobody bought; John Cusack plays him with a tired decency that gets lost in a film this size. Amanda Peet’s Kate exists to look at her ex-husband and slowly reconsider. Tom McCarthy’s Gordon is the most useful person in the car and the script treats him as a joke because he is not the father. Zlatko Burić’s Yuri Karpov is written as a cartoon and Burić gives him a weary grandeur the writing has not earned. We could have told you in the first half hour which of these people the film means to keep.

The Washington half is better written, because Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt are in it. Ejiofor’s Adrian Helmsley has to tell powerful men what they do not want to hear, and he plays it straight until the script makes him deliver a sermon. Platt’s Carl Anheuser has done the sums on who can be saved and will not apologise for the answer. He is the only character whose view the film finds inconvenient, and Platt argues it so well that the film has to shout him down. Danny Glover’s President Thomas Wilson is grave and kindly, and Thandiwe Newton, as his daughter Laura, gets an interest in Ejiofor and not much else.

David Brenner and Peter S. Elliot cut between Los Angeles, Yellowstone, Washington and the arks, and for the first hour the cross-cutting builds pressure. After that it becomes a timetable. Barry Chusid’s arks are vast grey hulls in a hangar cut into a mountain, smooth and with nothing in them to break, so the last forty minutes have none of the detail of the Los Angeles streets. Somewhere in the second hour we stopped counting cities and started counting minutes. By then we had seen the planet crack three times, and the fourth did not frighten us, and the script’s answer was to have people make speeches about humanity. We were bored, and the speeches made us cross.

Independence Day was just as silly and got away with it because it had a joke for every explosion. 2012 has the explosions. See it for the first hour, and at home, where you can stop it once Yellowstone has finished going off and tell yourself the rest was a sequel. It carries a 12A and runs 158 minutes, of which about sixty are the ones you want.