2012 Review

Back in 1996, we were impressed when the then nascent art of CGI enabled filmmakers to throw a few vehicles and livestock around in Twister. Just a dozen years later, it can be deployed to realistically as to chuck entire cities into the sea. We say "realistically", but this is still a Roland Emmerich movie and the main thrust isn't realism, it's the rollercoaster ride. This is cinema as spectacle pure and simple. And it works - the screening we attended featured the sort of audience self-expression more usually reserved for sporting events.

Emmerich really has made the ultimate disaster movie. That's not the same thing as the best disaster movie - those laurels may still rest with disaster movies from simpler times, such as 1975's The Towering Inferno, or Emmerich's own previous exercises in world-trashing, 2004's The Day After Tomorrow and 1996's Independence Day. His previous film 10,000BC might have been utter bunkum, but give the man a budget to end the world, and he's in his element.

The premise involves "the biggest solar eruptions in human history" sending out neutrinos that have "mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle." These, it's discovered in 2009 by Indian geologist Dr Satnam Tsurutani (Jimi Mistry) are heating up the Earth's core to such an extent that the tectonic plates are destabilising.

Tsurutani's American buddy Dr Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) takes the news straight to White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), who galvanises the powers that be. Cut forward a few years to the titular date, and things are getting worse fast.