Review of 2012
Emmerich has to resort to science fiction to slake audiences’ need for destruction on a super-colossal scale. Godzilla, in which a monster only attacks New York, is one of his smaller films. Having written off the beginnings of human history in 10,000 BC, Emmerich now turns to the immediate and terrifying future and tries to outdo the genocidal upheavals he wrought through alien invasion in Independence Day and global warming in The Day After Tomorrow.
The disaster cycle of the ‘70s had to escalate too — after an ocean liner and a skyscraper had been trashed in CinemaScope, the stakes had to be upped to an entire city in Earthquake and a continent or so in Meteor.
2012 has a less easy-to-sell (and, therefore, harder to worry about) concept than earlier moviemageddons — impending doom here isn’t just one big thing, but a matter of solar flares,
