2012, 2.5 stars

Roger Ebert gave this film a nearly perfect review, and in a way I see his point. No one who knows anything about this movie will leave feeling disappointed. The special effects are hilariously over-the-top, as is the acting, the plot, and just about everything else. The plot is this: through typical disaster-movie pseudoscience, solar flares have caused the earth's crust to boil and shift and the magnetic poles to reverse. Of course, this means many long scenes of explanation where scientists are asked to explain things, "in English, please!", another scene wherein a man and his daughter outrun the Yellowstone supervolcano, and many feats of physically impossible aviation.

However, I could have done with a bit less of the kitchen-sink approach to throwing cliches into the film. In a way this felt like a perfect disaster-movie corollary to Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which did the same for summer action blockbusters. However, Roland Emmerich as a director is above such postmodern nonsense. Trimming a few subplots and characters or including fewer completely improbable sequences would have made this a tight yet still excessive action film. Emmerich has a better eye for spatiotemporality than Bay does and should use it to make a disaster film that is truly interesting, instead of one that simple grinds its gears, goes through the motions, and then shuffles quietly out the door.