Roland Emmerich's 2009 film 2012 also features the end of the world as we know it, extreme weather conditions and continental drift. It'd also a loud, raucous, nonsensical litany of seemingly random things.  However, should this particular travesty of filmmaking remain popular 22 years after its release, it will prove the cinema audiences of the western world really do deserve to be collectively taken out and shot.

Emmerich, along with fellow celluloid molester Dean Devlin, set the tone for big screen FX-laden disaster flicks in the mid 90s, when Independence Day showed what happens when you take a bunch of quirky, likeable but not quite A-list actors, give them a piss-weak, cliche-laden script then throw all the money at the effects.

Fast forward 13 years, and Emmerich's trying the same trick again.  Though it's not aliens destroying the world, it's nature, as the Sun somehow turns neutrinos into microwaves that cook the Earth's core.  With three year's notice, the G8 set about building a bunch of giant ships in the Himalayas, offering hope to those who are carefully selected - either because of their positions of power or because of their bank balances.

In among all this, fighting to survive you have the President of the United States, an ordinary bloke who's separated from his wife and family, a noble but lowly scientist trying to do the right thing, some cute kids and a dog with unlikely survival abilities.  Basically, variations on a theme from every other Emmerich production produced, be it The Day After Tomorrow, Eight Legged Freaks, ID4, Godzilla...

But unlike those heady days in the 90s, the world has moved on.  Large scale disaster movies have lost their impact - it's hard to top the real life tragic images from New York, while effects expectations aren't what they were.  Back in 1996, a mile wide alien spaceship blowing up the White House or the Empire State Building looked like nothing we'd ever seen before.  Nowadays, we can see volcanoes exploding with gay abandon on your average episode of Doctor Who.

Plus, the FX in 2012 is all CG, as opposed to the model shots from ID4 - and for all there's more you can do in a computer, the physicality of that modelwork is desperately missed.  There's a received wisdom that CG never looks as good as models and while that's obviously not true, there are moments in here that you long for a sense of solidity.  

That said, it's not just in the FX work that there's issues over the solidity.  There's some good acting talent gathered here - John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Jimi Mistry, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Thandie Newton for starters - who are trying their hardest with a script best described as weak.  Character development is never a priority in these sorts of movies, admittedly, but when you've such an impressive cast it seems a shame to dispose and waste them.  Only Oliver Platt produces anything like a peformance of depth as the nominal villain of the piece - even though, for all the moralising and humanitarian rhetoric spouted by Ejiofor's character, Platt's position of practicality is rarely wrong.  

It doesn't help, of course, when the story is such utter bollocks.  To the point, the accursed point of these kind of films, where stuff happens only because it looks cool rather than even advancing the plot.  Characters die not out of sacrifice, or redemption, or because it even services the plot, but because the writers have run out of things for them to do.  I hope Beatrice Rosen and Thomas McCarthy, two fine talents who manage to make their desperately underwritten characters vaguely sympathetic, were on some kind of bonus payment for the pointless way they exit the film.

There's also one moment early on, where a throwaway character is murdered in Paris, which is deliberately designed and staged to echo the death of Princess Diana, apparently only for the sake of lazy referencing than for any drama or plot advancement.  It's horrifically tasteless and so out of kilter with the rest of the story as to be nonsensical.

2012 also turns out to be the first film where global events overtake the economies of scale on display.  The world powers set a EU1bn price tag on buying a seat on one of the survival arks.  A couple of years ago, when this was being written and prepped, that might have seemed merely offensively opulent.  Now it just sounds offensive.

I wanted to like 2012, I really did.  I loved ID4, and Eight Legged Freaks.  I can even tolerate Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow.  There's nothing wrong with a bit of mindless, explosive, big screen spectacle.  But this wasn't it.  It wasn't even spectacle.  It was just there, cliched and trite and dumb as a sack of lobotomised spaniels, wasting the talent on display.

Look, let me prove it, ok.  Here's one of the main setpiece scenes, shorn of it's FX (and with a bit of that bloody keyboard cat, sadly): 

And since the FX sequences are nothing to write home about, what have you got really?

I'll tell you what you've got.  Utter pish.