'2012': A worthwhile ending of the world

The end is coming. The Mayan calendar predicts that the apocalypse will come on December 12, 2012. And the newest disaster film from producer and director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day), which is fittingly named 2012, showcases what might happen when the end comes.

Author and part time limo driver Jackson Curtis (played by John Cusack) leads a group of survivors as they make several narrow and improbable escapes from cities that literally collapse around them. Audiences get to watch as Los Angeles sinks into the ocean and Yellowstone turns into a super volcano.

One word can be used to summarize the devastating visual effects that are used in this movie: Cool. From the small cracks in the ground that come from the shifting of the planet's crust to the really, really big cracks in the ground that swallow up cities, the effects in this film are stunning. In one intense moment, our survivors pilot a small plane through the streets of Los Angeles as freeways and skyscrapers full of people plummet towards the center of the earth.

There are plenty of emotional moments to supplement the movie's action scenes. One of the most powerful is a scene where a cruise ship performer call his estranged son and speaks to his granddaughter for the first time, just as their house is destroyed in a massive earthquake. Another scene depicts a family huddling together as a tsunami sweeps over them (a scene that may be all too familiar for many countries around the world).

The actors in the film are recognizable, and even though they aren't huge names, they offer huge performances. The movie stars Danny Glover as the President of the United States, Oliver Platt as the shady politician who's willing to sacrifice other people's lives to save humanity, and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity, Inside Man) as the geologist who discovers that the earth's doomed just in time to try to save a handful of humans. One of the more memorable roles in the film is Charley Frost, the red-neck conspiracy theorist who's played by Woody Harrelson. And of course there's Cusack, who is comfortable in his standard detached-from-society role.

This movie is a must-see for anyone that loves a good destruction film. Rather than preaching about global warming, this film gives movie-goers the sense that our end is inevitable: There's nothing we can do about it. The question then is how do we act in this situation? In trying to save our lives, do we lose our humanity? Like most everything these days, the film has an economical undertone. Anyone that plans on being on the ships that offer the only option for survival has to shell out one billion dollars per seat. This leaves anyone that isn't disgustingly wealthy out of luck.

Over all, the movie is worthwhile and entertaining. 2012 pulled in $225 million globally and $65 million domestically during its opening weekend, giving Hollywood a head start as it heads toward Thanksgiving weekend (which is typically one of the busiest weekends in movie theaters).

"It feels totally like summer," says Paul Dergarabedian, who is a box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. "This proves that if you put a summer movie anywhere in the release schedule, you can sometimes get summer numbers."