The sheer preposterousness of 2012 is too thick to ignore. In this world gone mad, you have to outrace an earthquake in a stretched limo, outrun a volcano in a Winnebago, get out of town just in the nick before a deadly dust cloud hits, and be saved by the fact the contents have shifted before having to endure a water landing in the middle of the Pacific in order to just get a chance at survival. Truly, if there’s a term best-suited for Roland Emmerich’s latest opus through the end of the world, it’s “disaster porn.” The man stuffs every possible disaster scenario in this film thanks to the implausible umbrella premise that on December 21st, 2012, massive solar flares caused by a once every 50,000 year planetary alignment will shift the Earth’s crust followed by a massive worldwide tsunami.

Every possible disaster, small and large, is squeezed into the heavy 2 hour and 40 minute running time. As well there’s every possible human melodrama that you can stand. There’s deadbeat dads, well-meaning stepfathers, idealistic young scientists, cynical political operatives, crazy conspiracy nuts that turnout to be right, and, for the coup de grâce, a pair of cute kids and a dog. The story takes a while to get going, but when the disasters start pouring in, Emmerich’s got you on the edge of his seat. In the wake of all this CG-eye candy, it’s almost easy to forget that there should be a plot in there somewhere. Almost.

John Cusack, a typically interesting and charismatic actor, gets hanged here playing a struggling novelist-slash-absentee father. On the other hand, he’s the luckiest SOB ever to grace the coincidence-mined battlefields of a disaster movie, because he has the serendipity of Ferris Bueller. Still, Cusack as the unlikely disaster hero everyman just didn’t seem right. But at least he had a character, which is more than what can be said for Amanda Peet, as his ex-wife, who seems to be part of the plot merely to reinforce the fact that Cusack’s Jackson won’t get any father of the year awards. As for poor stepdad Thomas McCarthy, he practically has “I’m-going-to-die-a-pointless-death” written all over him.

If the family dysfunction strikes you as prosaic, and you’d like something to focus your energy on besides the global carnage, there are your typical political puppet masters. Oliver Platt is down right Cheney-like in his portrayal of Chief of Staff, Carl Anheuser but at least with a sense of humour. The normally excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor plays doomsday expert Adrian Helmsley, but really, he’s the pastiche for a certain other African-American politician with lofty ideals and a good speaking voice. It seems inevitable that Anheuser and Helmsley would come to loggerheads, one being a calculating political operative, and the other a short-sighted idealist, When you hear Helmsley act with total shock that the government might kill to protect a literally earth-shattering secret, you think, “Has he never seen Wag the Dog?”

It’s as if the point of this thing is to argue, as Spock once put it, “The needs of the many over the needs of the few.” Would the government sell billion euro per seat tickets to salvation? You bet they would. But would the end of the world look this cool? Doubtful. Emmerich and his team craft some incredible visual effects, centrepieces and are probably due for some kind of Christmas bonus for all their efforts. Emmerich himself conducts things nicely, a pure maestro of the form who knows how to use lava covered Hawaiian vistas in the same way that a conductor knows just when the bassoon supposed to come into the composition.

Sadly, Emmerich says that this is his last flirtation with disaster, which is kind of analogous to when great sports figures retire from the field. The disaster genre has lost its all-time leading scorer. But paranoid buzzkills have another reason to be afraid of the winter solstice three years hence.