re: #22 wheat-dogg

There was a spate of such apocalyptic movies, each as ludicrous as the last one, between 1999 and 2012. Quite a few played on the millennialism being pushed by the Fundies, but also the “alternative histories” promulgated by the woo-woo fringe, If it wasn’t a ginormous earthquake, it was a climatic disaster, a supervolcano, an immense solar flare, an asteroid strike, or some other “act of God.” Any actual science was thrown out as unnecessary to the plot, which generally had billions die while a select few manage to survive.

I watch these kind of flicks just so I can debunk them for friends (or students) who take them as documentaries, and not complete fantasies.

2012 was the best of them. Roger Ebert put it quite nicely:

It’s not so much that the Earth is destroyed, but that it’s done so thoroughly. “2012,” the mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set-up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly.

This is fun. “2012” delivers what it promises, and since no sentient being will buy a ticket expecting anything else, it will be, for its audiences, one of the most satisfactory films of the year. It even has real actors in it. Like all the best disaster movies, it’s funniest at its most hysterical. You think you’ve seen end-of-the-world movies? This one ends the world, stomps on it, grinds it up and spits it out.

He gave it three and a half out of four stars.

rogerebert.com