You know far be it from me to lecture, I’ve seen enough action movies and enjoyed them. Hell I sat through ID4 from the same director, Roland Emmerich and enjoyed it. But there’s still something repulsive about a scene like this from 2012, in which a chase scene is set to the sight of millions of people dying as entertainment, while the chosen bland family led by John Cusack, makes it to safety against all the visually and physically improbable odds. ID4 was never quite this bad. Yes it took a little too much pleasure in smashing stuff, but at least it tried to treat it as a tragedy. There’s no serious effort to treat this as a tragedy, it’s a display of CG pyrotechnics incinerating and killing millions of people as nothing more than the background to a chase scene, as visual entertainment.

Of course the CG never slows down to show people falling from buildings and splattering on the sidewalk, children drowning in the water or incinerated in firestorms. That might make it less exciting to watch John Cusack and whatever C list actors were recruited to costar with him react to a bluescreen. Again that’s par for the course in numerous action movies, but 2012 seems to take it to the most repulsive level possible. Maybe it’s that there really is no story to take seriously except a whitebread middle class family running away surrounded by occasional wacky characters while millions of people die around them.

Maybe it’s that after Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, Emmerich has managed to take his one trick pony of reviving American disaster movies with CGI and the usual cast of wacky characters to the ultimate limit. There really is nothing more beyond this. In Idiocracy terms, 2012 is the butt cheeks of disaster movies. Forget an enemy or a monster. Forget pretty much everything. Just take your cheapest possible cast and have them run away from everything blowing up everywhere all around them. In a few years we might even be able to subtract the generic cast and just watch everything exploding on screen for 2 hours. That would at least be more honest.