Jackson Curtis (John Cusack, right) and his daughter, Lilly (Lily Morgan), face a global cataclysm in the sci-fi thriller 2012. (Sony Pictures)

Roland Emmerich must be running out of ways to destroy the world.

Stepping into the shoes left vacant by producer Irwin Allen, the German director has become the king of the disaster movie, singlehandedly keeping the genre alive with Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Surely it was only the lack of established human settlements in the paleolithic period that prevented him from levelling cities in 10,000 B.C., too.

2012 is eerily bloodless – the grand vistas of destruction are largely free of any evidence of the millions or even billions of human casualties.

Then again, Emmerich drew heat for falsely attributing Nazi-like atrocities to British redcoats in his Revolutionary War drama The Patriot (2000), so perhaps we’re better off when he sticks to the less nuanced matter of an imminent global apocalypse. And boy, is it ever imminent, at least according to 2012.

Emmerich’s latest ode to carnage suggests we’ve got less than three years left before all hell breaks loose. Rather than an alien invasion or rapid climate change, the problem this time is the heating of the Earth’s core by neutrinos from solar flares. Eventually, the Earth’s crust will destabilize, dumping coastal areas like California into the sea and threatening the rest of the world with giant tsunamis.

All of this was allegedly foretold by the ancient Mayans, though plenty of scholars swear that’s a bunch of hooey. Me, I’m putting my trust in Charlie Frost, the wacko, conspiracy-spewing radio host played by Woody Harrelson, the most memorable character in 2012’s cast of windy, two-dimensional bores.

Jackson Curtis, a science-fiction writer and single dad played by John Cusack, serves as our understandably harried tour guide for the end of the world. He first catches wind of the badness to come during a camping trip to Yellowstone National Park with his kids. This is also where he first encounters Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the scientist who first alerted the U.S. government to those pesky neutrinos and who has reluctantly become part of the international effort to cover up the truth from the easily panicked masses.

Civilization is threatened by natural disaster in 2012. (Sony Pictures)

The problem becomes much harder to conceal when Los Angeles crumbles into the Pacific, with Jackson and his tykes making a hasty exit along with his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her new hubby (Tom McCarthy), whose prowess as a pilot comes in handy. Painstakingly rendered, thoroughly spectacular and utterly ludicrous, the movie’s first FX set piece is an accurate sign of what’s to come.

It’s also eerily bloodless – 2012’s grand vistas of destruction are largely free of any evidence of the millions or even billions of human casualties. Emmerich places little stock in the post-9/11 consciousness that’s palpable in contemporary catastrophe flicks like The Host, Cloverfield or Steven Spielberg’s revamp of War of the Worlds. No, he’s a showman in the Irwin Allen tradition. Indeed, Emmerich pays fealty to that disaster-movie huckster by including many of Allen’s favourite things: capsizing cruise ships (The Poseidon Adventure), burning buildings (The Towering Inferno), erupting volcanoes (When Time Ran Out) and biblical floods (uh, Flood!).

That’s a lot of damage to inflict, even after Jackson and his loved ones make it to higher ground in the Himalayas. And at a running time of nearly 160 minutes, 2012 becomes a test of endurance for characters and viewers alike. With The Day After Tomorrow, Emmerich was relatively economical with the hokum. Here, he lays it on with such reckless abandon that he makes Michael Bay seem like a model of restraint. Not only does Danny Glover, who suffers nobly as the U.S. president, get to deliver a farewell address to his doomed nation and give a tearful goodbye to his daughter, he wanders ash-faced among the wounded just before Washington, D.C., is smushed by a giant tidal wave. As for Jackson and the other survivors, their continuing worries about family issues seem so callous in the face of all this death that they come off like uncaring sociopaths.

Emmerich caps it off the only way he can: with a histrionic power ballad by Adam Lambert. One can only presume that Aerosmith was destroyed with the rest of California.

2012 opens Nov. 13.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.