Not in a whimper, not in a bang, but in a blah

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel bored.

“2012” is a disaster film about the biggest disaster of all, the end of virtually all life on the face of the Earth. That’s the sort of thing you would think it would be impossible to make too big.

Meet schlockmeister director Roland Emmerich, who covered much the same territory in his 1996 apocalyptic disaster film “Independence Day” and his 2004 apocalyptic disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow.” For his third try at the exact same story, Emmerich leans heavily on the greatly improved special effects to make his movie bigger than big. And not coincidentally, longer than long.

“2012” is so big and so long (and so clichéd and so predictable and so cheesy) that it becomes quite dull. There are only so many special effects a fellow can take, especially since it is the same two or three effects repeated over and over, and so much pounding music.

At no point in this film is there any doubt about who will survive the apocalypse, and who will die. Seven billion people will die. The cute little dog will survive.

One of Emmerich’s many problems is that he shows us far too many of the seven billion, scattered in too many places around the globe. We have John Cusack as a writer and Amanda Peet as his estranged wife and the mother of his two children in Los Angeles (anyone want to take bets on whether they reconcile?). We have Danny Glover as the thoughtful and noble president in Washington, Thandie Newton as his daughter and Oliver Platt as a high-ranking official.

We have astrophysicists in India, a welder and his Buddhist brother in China, and two old codger musicians (including George Segal) wistfully noting the passage of time on a cruise ship in the Pacific. We have Woody Harrelson as a nutcase ex machina in Yellowstone National Park, and Chiwetel Ejiofer as a scientist pretty much everywhere. We have a Russian billionaire with a blonde girlfriend and twin sons in Las Vegas, and some generic Arab sheik in some room somewhere.

It gets to the point that when we see the Indian astrophysicist late in the film, we think, “Oh, yeah, I forgot he was in this movie.”

The main characters who do not make it to the end are generally all given the chance to make a noble speech, or at least share a tearful goodbye. As for the potential survivors on whom we focus the most, we are not worried about them because they have a statistically improbable ability to outrace whatever disaster is immediately behind them, no matter how fast it is closing.

At one point, Cusack is even able to run and catch up to a plane that is in the process of taking off. That’s some mighty fast running.

The catching-up-to-the-plane scene might well be the movie’s most ridiculous, but it has plenty of competition. About half of the time that we laugh at this movie, it is at something that is intentionally humorous. The other half is at things that are just…so…stupid.

The point of movies such as this is to see special-effect destruction on a massive scale, and many of the effects here are indeed fairly spectacular. Others, especially when several things are happening at once, tend to look flat, badly animated or silly. But even when the effects are good, what is missing from them is the sense of fun. If you see one landmark being destroyed (as Emmerich did with the U.S. Capitol in “Independence Day”), it can be enjoyably cathartic. But a dozen or more landmarks crashing into the earth results only in apathy born of repetition.

“2012” is so big because it wants to be the end-of-the-world movie to end all end-of-the-world movies.

We can only hope.