DVD Review: 2012

2012. 151 minutes. Rated M. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Written by Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser.

One of the many great attractions of cinema is the artform's ability to create magic – to capture our imagination and transport us to another time and place where we spend time sharing in the lives of others. We can walk away from the cinema enriched, moved, educated and entertained. We can spend hours afterwards discussing the story, the characters, particular scenes and how we feel about what we have just witnessed. When magic happens in the cinema, it has the power to change the way we think about life and our place in the world. It can, in short, be the most enriching experience. But when we are promised magic and it never appears, then it's an entirely different story.

When science-fiction writer Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) discovers that Earth is about to be destroyed by an environmental catastrophe that will trigger a contintent-swamping mega-tsunami, he also learns that gigantic arks have been secretly built (in China) to ensure the survival of humanity. At one billion euros (one a half billion Australian dollars) a ticket, Curtis cannot hope to afford tickets for his ex-wife and his two children, so instead, he resolves to find these massive lifeboats and smuggle his family onboard.

It's almost impossible to imagine what went wrong with this film. Its classy production pedigree, experienced cast and a massive $200 million plus budget should have guaranteed at least something – but the lazy, cliché-ridden script and the awful "acting" combine to result in a film so incomprehensibly bad that it is only ever, and almost immediately, just boring. While a couple of the set-pieces are impressively imagined (watch out for a rogue aircraft carrier heading for Washington DC), the lavish scale of the end-of-the-world destruction sequences actually only results in them only looking and feeling fake. That they wipe-out most of the film's cloyingly bad acting actually only ends up being a blessed relief.

Emmerich (Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC) and composer-turned-screenplay-writer Kloser, share all the responsibility for this monumental dud that utterly fails to generate one moment of genuine emotion or interest throughout its tedious, interminable two-and-a-half hour running time. But even so, Emmerich has actually achieved something quite unique. He's managed to make a film about the end of the world that I, for one, couldn't have cared less about. Maybe that is a kind of magic after all?