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The end of the world is rated PG-13.
If you were ever going to use some profanity or a few choice expletives, this would be the time. But "2012" is designed to cast a wide audience net, so it reins in the language of the livid.
"2012" opens in the year 2009 with solar eruptions, the heating of Earth's core and signs that the planet's crust will shift and, in a couple of years, end life as we know it.
The story is filtered through one family -- failed novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), his ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), their two young children and Kate's doctor-boyfriend, Gordon (Tom McCarthy) -- and a couple of scientists, White House officials and their relatives, and a crazy coot and broadcaster (Woody Harrelson) in Yellowstone National Park.
- Starring: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt.
- Rating: PG-13 for intense disaster sequences and some language.
- Web site: www.whowillsurvive2012.com
Danny Glover plays the widowed president of the United States, Thandie Newton his daughter and Oliver Platt the take-charge chief of staff. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the president's chief science adviser, who sounds the alarm about the impending disaster in 2009.
When the scientist bursts into a fancy Washington, D.C., fundraiser and presses some paperwork onto Platt's character, the chief of staff sneers, "Let me guess? National geology crisis?"
As a matter of fact, yes. Not just a national crisis but an international one, which sets nefarious plans into motion about who will live or die and what the cost will be.
Cusack's character stumbles into a way to possibly save his family, and they encounter calamities from one end of the planet to the other.
But does anyone care about the people when there are 10.5 earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, fires, tumbling towers, ash clouds and floods of biblical proportions to worry about and watch?
The best effects are the earthquakes, some of which were staged on enormous floating decks that were shaken and stirred with a hydraulic and air pneumatic system. The ground splits, shifts, heaves and swallows everything in its path.
Other effects, when cities slide into the sea or ships are flipped on their sides or set afire with lava, are so obviously computer-generated that they're far less believable.
Despite the death of billions of people, the whole movie seems bloodless and emotionless. Even if it doesn't provoke tears, it should leave you with a little lump in your throat instead of questions about how long TV transmissions and cell phones would work or how planes could fly through concussive explosions.
It's too much about the machinery and madness of earthly destruction and too little about the men, women and handful of children. The screenplay by director Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser poses an ethical, essential question about the powers-that-be withholding predictions about the impending doom, but it's not debated in any depth.
Filmed in Vancouver during five months, "2012" takes "Earthquake," "The Day After Tomorrow," "Deep Impact," "The Core," "The Poseidon Adventure" and other disaster movies and goes meta for 158 minutes with barely a laugh to lighten the load.
Our fair city, by the way, gets a sad shoutout in the form of an ominous announcement. A high-ranking government official is lost in an ash cloud outside Pittsburgh. And just when we had shaken off that "hell with the lid off" image.
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