2012 (Reviewed by Sebastian Ng)

It's such a pity, because the underlying science used to explain how the planet can shred its surface like a cobra sheds its skin is interesting in concept if inconceivable in practice. (Fact: Yellowstone is in danger of developing into the most destructive supervolcano on Earth; the geomagnetic reversal of the Earth's poles is believed to be imminent.) Each of these catastrophic events, on its own, would be enough fodder for a single movie. Emmerich has combined all of them for the disaster movie that makes all future disaster movies pointless.

The CGI certainly looked promising on the trailer; in particular, the disintegration of LA looked eye-poppingly realistic. The joke in the industry was that G.I. Joe's vfx shots looked ridiculously bad because Digital Domain chose to spend more time on 2012. (Err, unsubstantiated.) On the big screen though, the seams showed through on the California megaquake sequence, and several of the rest of the CGI-heavy scenes looked fake, especially the Yellowstone pyroclastic flow sequence.

Then comes the worst part about the film – the script, with its careless contrivances and rampant cheesiness. The film was predictable from beginning to end, and I just wish it wasn't, because it's not that hard. When you put your protagonists through a dozen close calls over the course of a film, it actually gets disappointing to see them survive 100% of the time. Other lesser characters survive the most improbable of situations (many, many times), only to get knocked off in the most purposeless manner later on. When something has to crash into a Himalayan mountain, it had to be Mt. Everest (and not, say, Nanga Prabat or, simply, an unnamed Himalayan mountain), just so that Americans can feel smart as they point out, "Hey, that's the tallest mountain in the world!" When a quake begins tearing up the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, can you guess where on the painting is it gonna split? Of course you can. Most audiences may find it funny; however, I'm worried about my eye muscles from all that eye-rolling.

Chiwetel Ejiofor should be given an Oscar for making his character so compelling despite the script. Everyone else just seemed to burrow into the core of one-dimensionality, especially the secondary characters. And what's with the worldview of the movie? The movie posits a debate: should more people be saved, when there are only 15 mins left before the final disaster makes extinct the human species? The antagonist argues against it for the sake of the survival of the human race, while the protagonist offered some bullshit about acts of kindness being a necessary condition for human civilization … and the antagonist actually made a LOT more sense.

One wishes Emmerich would have realised his inanity in writing scripts by now and just focused on the big, CGI stuff. There were so many times in the movie during false melodramatic scenes when I was thinking: dang, can we get to the next bit already? I just wanna see continents eat itself up.

2012 will be big, no doubt; it pulled in $225 million worldwide just over the weekend. And it will be big in Malaysia. (Shudders at the memory of reading about nutcases who saw Transformers 2 fourteen times.) But, as I kept saying to friends after the movie: imagine what JJ Abrams could have done with the premise.

Director Roland Emmerich Cast John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover Runtime 158 mins Opens 12 Nov

Sebastian Ng studied filmmaking at the Los Angeles Film School in Hollywood, majoring in Directing and Sound Design but spent most of his time watching movies, and attending film festivals and meet-the-filmmaker sessions. Having returned to Malaysia in 2008, he currently works as a digital production coordinator for Rhythm & Hues Studios (Malaysia). He continues to fuel his passion for film by writing reviews and other ramblings for his blog, Cinematic Concerns.