World comes to end — again — in ‘2012’

The disaster movie "2012" is based on the ancient Mayan prophesy that the world will end three years after a "Transformers" sequel makes $400 million.

So the clock is ticking, and "2012" aims to show all Twitter followers of Harry Knowles just how freaking awesome the apocalypse will be - Los Angeles slides into the sea, Vegas into the desert, and Yellowstone simply explodes (something that crossed the mind of anybody who tried to sit through that Ken Burns documentary).

The movie is directed by German doomsday-fetishist Roland Emmerich, who brings his usual mix of bombast, accidental comedy (the end of the world cures a girl of her bed-wetting) and geographic illiteracy.

John Cusack plays a divorcee/novelist who, on visitation weekend, takes his kids to Yellowstone, miraculously a short drive from Los Angeles. There, he meets a nutty conspiracy buff (Woody Harrelson, putting the ham in HAM radio) who believes the world is ending, and has detailed maps of where the planet's rich and powerful plan to build ships to ride out the storm.

Cusack's character discovers it's all about to come horribly true, and retrieves his estranged family in a limo just as the solar flares superheat the earth's core to cause the surface to crack, vibrate and implode.

"2012" works, from time to time, as a weird action comedy - the best scenes have Cusack motoring just ahead of the collapsing earth's crust, or doing the same thing on a plane over an airport runway. Say this for Emmerich and the $200 million he spent on cheeseball effects - you see every penny on screen.

He gets his second-tier stars on the cheap. With Morgan Freeman ("Deep Impact") promoted to Nelson Mandela, Danny Glover gets the disaster-movie job of minority U.S. president who presides over his country's destruction.

This yields one of the most demented images in recent film history - the African-American president covered in white ash, watching, like some dazed, confused minstrel, as a tidal wave obliterates the White House.

Is that image meant to mean something? Is there some kind of wacky theme to Emmerich's work, some hidden complexity to blunt destruction of nations, monuments, even cathedrals?

He uses "2012" to destroy St. Peter's in Rome, taking the Pope with it, and you wonder if this is some kind of anti-religious commentary, except that Emmerich himself has just taken such vengeful pleasure in destroying L.A. and Vegas, presumably our Sodom and Gommorrah.

On some level, Emmerich seems to want this to be funny; there are snide jokes about Chinese outsourcing, green cards and doomsaying broadcasters.

Emmerich, though, is not fundamentally a funny filmmaker. He's fundamentally cheesy, and there's always something flat and phony to those few scenes meant to give his movies some modicum of humanity.

He's completely insincere (not a good quality in a director so long-winded). After awhile, you start to wonder if the reason Emmerich takes such delight in showing us great masses of people dying is because he wouldn't mind if they did.

He's not alone. Our peculiar species takes great pleasure in imagining its violent destruction, over and over again. Emmerich, who has paradoxically positioned "2012" for a sequel, will have to hustle to get it finished by 2011.