End of the world as we know it, but the dog is fine

Despite having been totally disproved by Mayan researchers, a popular theory of global cataclysm is that the world will come to an end in 2012 based on the calendar of this pre-Columbian people. Facts never seem to stop Hollywood, however. And so we have another disaster movie from German director Roland Emmerich, the man who brought you Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. With Emmerich in this mode, it’s not a ship or a skyscraper in trouble but the whole planet. And, invariably, no matter how many billions of people die (off stage, right), a cute dog is sure to survive.
It is dispiritingly puritan, a nasty element only realised at the end of the film, when virtually all the people who have sex outside of marriage are bumped off. Well, if fatal catastrophe befalls the innocent billions, you can’t have these ‘sinners’ getting away scot-free. One of them is a man surnamed Zimmerman – I wonder how Hollywood’s Jewish lobby reacted to that? Maybe as he turned out quite personable before his untimely destruction, it was sanctioned, but he had to go as he was the Mum’s partner and there’s no room for modern families here. I wrote virtually everyone as said Mum had to live being as she is an integral part of the family unit. John Cusack’s Dad, from the state of his apartment clearly has no female companionship and so he is ‘safe’.
But we don’t see a “Roland Emmerich Film” for morality lessons. Tapping into millenarian fears, such as climate change, it’s for the special effects and these in the middle section do not disappoint. They have to be seen in the cinema to get their true impact. There is hokum throughout as the town collapses behind them (as in TV Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s finale though with less self-knowledge) or they avoid exploding rocks cast out by the mother of all volcanoes or by a metre or two escape a hurtling hydraulic pump. It’s hard to know if irony is present after all this when one character says “it’s a suicide mission.” I laughed at it all the same. Amid all the chaos and the mega-tsunamis to end all mega-tsunamis, there are inconsistencies which one shouldn’t dwell one but can’t really help, such as why does one chamber fill up with water far more than the one behind and the one in front (other than the trapped character has had sex outside marriage and with two different men and so must die).
I did like the cameo from ‘Arnold Schwarznegger’ (if it was he and not a stuntman from Schwarznegger films years ago, now getting a minor shot at the big time) and the use of an Antonov aircraft (with a rip-off from The Living Daylights of how they bail out from it). At the very close, it takes the end of the world before Americans can actually formulate the date in a logical, linear fashion and isn’t that the truth. A rare fact in such a movie.