What does Roland Emmerich have against the world’s most treasured monuments? As aficionados will note, the director sank the Statue of Liberty in a tidal wave in The Day After Tomorrow and fired alien death rays at the White House and Empire State Building in Independence Day. But after watching his newest film, it’s clear that Emmerich was just getting started. In 2012, he lays waste, in short order, to the Sistine Chapel, the Washington Monument, Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue, Air Force One, Yellowstone National Park, the White House (again) and the Randy’s Donuts sign in L.A. (He even takes a chunk out of Mount Everest.) It’s gotten to the point, Emmerich said recently, that owners of buildings like Taiwan’s Taipei 101 are lobbying him to topple their own towers on film.

The calamity in 2012 derives not, as you might expect, from that year’s worldwide panic over Sarah Palin’s ascent to the presidency, nor are global warming or monsters like Godzilla to blame. Instead, the culprit is — well, I’m not sure, actually. There is a lot of fast talk right up front about solar flares, a Mayan prophecy, the earth’s overheating core, and the deadly, deadly nature of neutrinos, but those who skipped quantum physics class may not be able to keep up. Which is fine, since it seems Emmerich (who cowrote the film with Harald Kloser) felt that only a slim pretext was necessary to set loose unbridled havoc on humanity, and its landmarks.

But the biggest geology action film in history is not simply a lot of pretty pictures of tidal waves crashing over the Himalayas. Los Angeles County statute mandates that disaster movies wrangle up a huge, diverse cast to put a human face on tragedy, even if the most required of that cast is to look really frightened as something unspeakably horrible approaches, just out of view.

And so we get John Cusack, mellowed 20 years after Say Anything, playing a stock divorcee father with a tenuous relationship to his own kids, his wife (Amanda Peet), and the guy who replaced him (the director Tom McCarthy, so great as a sniveling reporter on The Wire). But we also see a tired Danny Glover as the president, Thandie Newton as his conflicted/confused daughter, Woody Harrelson (having a ball) as a nutso conspiracy theorist, Oliver Platt as a jackass politico, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the Scientist Who Knew It All Along. Oh, and there are two aging jazz players on a cruise ship, a kindly Chinese family, and a Russian mogul with his spoiled children, his surgically enhanced girlfriend, and her dog. Why, I’m not sure.

Through it all, as you may have guessed, these people must exude grit and rely on each other to face down death, or at least have touching phone calls while trying to doing so. The resulting stew of human emotions is not exactly Altmanesque; frankly, it doesn’t even measure up to the relationships established in Independence Day, which was more fun.

Still, it is not Emmerich’s command of the human spirit that fills theaters, so let’s leave that aside and explore the explosions. At this point, the director has become an expert at frying (or freezing) the world, and it shows. (Read the exclusive 30 Ninjas interview with the film’s VFX guys here.) Cusack plays an unsuccessful novelist named Jackson Curtis, who moonlights as a limo driver, conveniently providing a big vehicle that comfortably fits his family as they drive at breakneck speed away from, well, the ground — which is cracking into pieces with wild abandon in the biggest earthquake ever.

Soon, a plane appears, and our heroes fly through the twisted, collapsing mess of the Santa Monica Freeway and away from the sight of Los Angeles sliding into the Pacific, perhaps a pleasant image for some. An unexpected American supervolcano goes berserk and rains ash on the whole country, while the world’s tectonic plates begin trading places and Las Vegas, Washington, and various world cities die quick deaths. Seen close-up, through our protagonists’ eyes, the effects are of such a terrifying new quality that you begin to think that catastrophes like these could somehow be possible. And as the camera pulls back, giving us a wide view of a tidal wave pancaking the White House with an aircraft carrier, you begin to think that Emmerich was one of those kids who liked to build vast Tinker Toy cities — or better yet, watch other kids build them — just so he could have the pleasure of tearing them down.

Amid all of 2012‘s apocalyptic mayhem, Ejiofor’s scientist character tries to uncover a potentially nefarious escape plot hatched by the world’s governments (the G8, to be specific), naturally retaining his nobility the whole time. But by the end of the film, I was left a little numb. Although it was clear that billions of people perished during the course of the film, its heroes kept bounding through cataclysm, essentially untouched as the disasters got bigger and bigger. Yet unlike in earlier Emmerich films, there is no villain to defeat in 2012, as it’s hard to talk the earth out of exploding when it’s got its mind made up. All Cusack and company are able to do is hold on tight and wait for everything to end, which, when you think about it, is a pretty apt metaphor.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Exclusive Interview: 2012‘s VFX Wizards Reveal How They Flattened the White House With an Aircraft Carrier and Scared the Bejesus Out of Director Roland Emmerich (Part 3)
• Exclusive Interview: 2012‘s Visual Effects Wizards Tell Us How They Destroyed the World in 1,315 Simple Steps (Part 1)
• Japanese 2012 Trailer
• Exclusive: VFX Wizards Reveal How Emmerich Will Put the World Back Together Again in Anonymous
• Exclusive Interview: 2012‘s VFX Geniuses Reveal How They Flooded the Himalayas (and Sent That Poor Monk Scurrying for His Snorkel) (Part 2)
• 2012 Gets a TV Deal?