A scene from the movie '2012'

Another doomsday movie from the makers of “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Independence Day” is “2012,” whose premise is based on the Mayan calendar that the world ends on December 21, 2012. If that’s true, then we all have only two more years to live. There have been several predictions about the end of the world since our high school days (the last one was in 2000 with the coming of the new millennium) and they all proved to be false. Only God knows when Judgment Day would be and, for all we know, it’s not going to be as devastating as what these disaster movies show.

Viewers usually watch movies like this for the scenes of destruction. To give it a semblance of a story, there are also human characters. The US president here is black (Danny Glover),  just like in real life. A geologist, Dr. Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), while on a trip to India in 2009, discovers from Dr. Satnam Tsurutani (Jimi Mistry) that the world will end in 2012 due to an unusual activity of the sun that overheats the earth’s core. He immediately reports this to his immediate superior in the White House, Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), who is very businesslike about the whole thing and maps up plans for people to survive after the end of the world. An international team is tasked to find a solution that will help save the human race. The president’s daughter, Laura (Thandie Newton), gets suspicious when the Louvre’s director is killed and it turns out tickets for one to survive are being sold to the highest bidders.

In Los Angeles, a novelist, Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), is having a vacation with his kids (Liam James and Morgan Lily) in Yosemite when he meets Helmsley and a radio show host, Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), who tells him about the world ending based on the belief of the Mayans. He then hears that a huge earthquake devastated LA so he goes back home and warns ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and her new boyfriend, Gordon (Tom McCarthy). They all get into Jackson’s car and while they escape from LA, highways crumble, the earth cracks wide open, and buildings fall like dominoes. It’s good Gordon can pilot a plane and they all fly to Yellowstone where it’s believed that the government has constructed some space ships to save humanity. But Yellowstone turns into an active pyrotechnics volcano so they have to fly to China to survive. Aside from them, other characters include people in Tibet, Gordon’s boss Yuri and girlfriend Tamara who they keep on bumping into, and some folks on a cruise ship. It turns out gigantic arks have been built by a global consortium inside the Himalayas and animals are already on board, just like in Noah’s ark.

In fairness to the actors, they all act seriously, as if they believe this movie will be a classic like “Casablanca” or “Gone with the Wind.” John Cusack becomes the action hero who gets involved in many action stunts like making his van leap over a huge chasm and unblocking a jammed hydraulic lift that might sink their ark. But the real stars here are the catastrophes that befall on our planet that is like a compilation of various movies made in the past from “Earthquake,” “Airport” and “Volcano” to “Towering Inferno,” “Titanic” and ”Tsunami.” So we see skyscrapers collapsing from earthquakes, volcanoes erupting and raining balls of fire, we also see fires and plane crashes and ships being eaten by mammoth waves.

It’s all there, smorgasbord style. The movie succeeds in its intention, making it the mother of all disaster flicks to end all disaster flicks. This is what moviegoers pay for and they won’t be disappointed as they’d really see humanity being pulverized. Familiar landmarks are all decimated: The Golden Gate Bridge (already destroyed in “X-Men”), the Eiffel Tower (also demolished in “GI Joe”), the Washington Monument, the Big Ben, the White House, the Vatican, all of Los Angeles that is shown sinking into the sea, and all of Las Vegas being swallowed by the earth.

Director Roland Emmerich really goes on a big-scale rampage of wanton destruction, sparing nothing and no one. This required spectacular special effects that made the budget escalate to $200 million. When they strung it all together, the film’s running time is almost three hours and they probably felt it’d be a waste to delete any sequence they already shot so the movie just goes on and on. It is so over the top and the demolition sequences become repetitive that after a while, it gets quite tedious and you just wish the movie would soon end, not the world.

But if the apocalypse would really come on Dec. 21, 2012, be sure to do your Christmas shopping early on that year and give them away a week before Christmas, just to be sure.