The Acne Medications

People who view screenwriting as an art and don’t particularly care about audience reaction to their films bristle at the thought of screenplay classes, in which Plot Element A and Plot Element B can be put together in such a way that– voila!– a hit is born. But Roland Emmerich has taken that very kind of formula writing and made a veritable empire out of it, returning every few years to destroy some corner of the earth and invent a handful of earnest heroes, wisecracking sidekicks and solemn old men to survive his newest take on the apocalypse.

With 2012, as you probably could have guessed from the poster art of tidal waves crashing over the Himalayas, Emmerich is letting go of whatever restraint he might have had before. Clocking in at nearly three hours, boasting about a dozen major characters and at least half a dozen emotional death scenes, 2012 operates on the assumption that, if we liked seeing New York destroyed in The Day After Tomorrow and Washington D.C. zapped in Independence Day, we’ll really love witnessing the wholesale destruction of the globe.

I hate to say it, but Emmerich is pretty much right. Far from conveying the horrors that might befall us should anything remotely so destructive happen, 2012 feels more like a soothing bath of Hollywood tropes and cliches, allowing us to witness Los Angeles slide into the ocean like Atlantis, but then warming us with a Woody Harrelson wisecrack and a rousing speech from Chiwetel Ejiofor. It’s numbing, sure, especially when the first half is nothing but CGI explosion after another, but on some level it’s exactly what we expect out of Hollywood– shallow spectacle and a bevy of stars, an adventure and a few moral lessons, a giant budget spent guaranteeing we won’t feel a bit different than we did when walking into the theater.

If there’s any surprise at all in 2012, it’s that Chiwetel Ejiofor, not John Cusack, is in fact the star of the film. We meet him in what amount to the film’s prologue, a White House-employed geologist trying to prove to a cynical chief of staff (Oliver Platt, wonderfully hammy and villainous) that, in fact, the end is nigh. The cause is less important than the results– giant fissures open up inthe earth ’s surface, mountains turns to volcanos and skyscrapers turn to ash, and eventually tidal waves cover the entire earth’s surface.

Billions of people die in the ensuing melee, but there are only a few we’re instructed to care about. Chief among them is Cusack and his family, who start driving out of Los Angeles seconds before the destruction begins thanks to a tip from Woody Harrelson, who plays a Yellowstone-residing conspiracy theorist who saw the whole thing coming and made a YouTube video about it (Emmerich’s nods toward modern concerns, like casting Danny Glover as the President and having characters constantly complain about cell service, head toward parody when Harrelson demands that Cusack “download my blog.”) Plot mechanics too silly to describe require Cusack, his ex-wife (Amanda Peet), her new boyfriend (Tom McCarthy) and their cutesy kids (Liam James and Morgan Lily) to fly a series of planes on their way to China, where they intend to save their own skins in a manner that’s best left discovered in the theater.
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