2012

I've kinda had a mixed response to Roland Emmerich's films.

I really enjoyed Stargate, Universal Soldier was okay for what it was, Independence Day was great as a giant B-movie, I enjoyed Godzilla, though recognise it's flawed and that a lot hate it and Eight Legged Freaks was trashy fun.

But The Day After Tomorrow, while having amazing effects, was awful and 10,000BC was one of the worst films I've ever seen.

Both of those two had the unfortunate problem of being scientifically bonkers, but unlike his other films they didn't compensate by acknowledging their daftness or by being purely 'genre' films. And 2012 got off to a worrying start on this front with the revelation that neutrinos put out by the sun were causing the Earth's core to heat up.

Oh dear.

However, while there is other such stupid science stuff in the film, it manages to keep this to a bare minimum. Instead if spends a lot more time focused on the characters and on showing the actual disasters that are going on.

Unfortunately, those characters are a little thin and a bit too stereotypical. The only thing that really works with the characters is that there's no Hollywood "evil" people, as such - you do get the impression that while some of them do bad things on occasion, they're equally capable of good things.

You also get the impression they've had a really good think about how the world's governments would actually go about trying to save the world. So while you do get some hint of "all corporations are evil" the counterpoint is made that how else could they have gotten the ships they use to survive the disaster made?

And problems like who do you save and when do you tell people also get some exploration. There's not a lot of exploration to be fair (in particular there's little thought given to extended families - almost nobody cares for or worries about anyone that doesn't appear on-screen, so with only one exception nobody is worried about their friends/parents/work colleagues, etc), but more than you might expect from a popcorn movie like this.

What you do get in spades is luscious visuals, stuff blowing up and getting destroyed on an immense scale and fistfuls of breathtaking CGI. Unfortunately, it does take the better part of two and a half from beginning to end and while I wouldn't ever say the film was dull, that's a very long disaster movie.

My overall verdict is that it's not quite as good as Independence Day, but it's a lot better than the likes of Tomorrow and 10,000BC.

The DVD also had a bunch of extras, which included a commentary, deleted scenes and, interestingly, an alternate ending that is, quite frankly, cheesy rubbish.