We begin at the beginning.

After watching Broken Embraces, the worst Pedro Almodovar movie in nearly twenty years, I was relieved to see 2012 in my pile of mail. A nice, harmless popcorn movie with lots of exploding shit. Unfortunately, it should have been alternately titled "I know we have five minutes to live and the fate of humankind rests in our hands but first I'd like to share this anecdote from my childhood." John Cusack is a divorced father dropping his kids off after the most depressing trip to Yellowstone Park imaginable. They've spent the weekend looking at dead elk, touring sulfurous bug-infested mud pits, and watching their dad wander off for hours to drink beer with a raving lunatic. The ex-wife (Amanda Peet) has a new, more attentive husband (read:square) who, as luck would have it, is the only plastic surgeon in California who's also a licensed pilot. That quickly comes in handy as they are flying over the bay area as it falls into a giant hole in the ground. After seeing an entire city swallowed up by the earth, taking with it her home and everyone she knows, she calmly asks "Where do we go now?" The people in this movie are incredibly nonchalant about the end of the world. In one scene, they're hurtling over a glacier in a Bentley (don't ask) and Cusack states "The car won't start" with the same intonation and conviction as someone would say "I had toast today." A strange pattern emerges: Everyone who kneels and prays to god to be saved promptly gets squashed by a building or falls into a bottomless pit. Even the pope meets a gruesome and theatrical death. I guess the filmmakers couldn't resist the image of Michaelangelo's "Creation" splitting down the middle between the iconic fingers of God and Adam, just before the Sistine chapel collapses, taking out the entire cardinal college in one fell swoop. Like disaster movies of the seventies, it has to tell the stories of thirty different characters so you give a shit when they're drowned or burned alive. But at 200 minutes, did we really need to hear about the elderly jazz bassist who doesn't talk to his son? Or the Russian slut? Or the buddhist monk? Oh well. I liked this better than the Almodovar.