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2012
EMAILPRINTColumbia Pictures (Sony)

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 34 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 276 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Drama | Sci-fi | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Roland Emmerich
Harald Kloser
Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 13, 2009
DVD: March 2, 2010
Running Time: 158 minutes, Color
Origin: USA | Canada
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for intense disaster sequences and some language
Starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, and Woody Harrelson
Never before has a date in history been so significant to so many cultures, so many religions, scientists, and governments. 2012 is an epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors. (Sony Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Metacritic's Top 10 Most Notorious Disaster Movies
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
There's something to be said for a formula picture done almost to perfection. In 2012, Emmerich gives you everything you expect, but gives it to you bigger.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Dan Kois
2012 takes the disaster movie -- once content simply to threaten the Earth with a comet, or blow up the White House -- to its natural conclusion, the literal end of the world.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set-up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
The visual effects are pretty sensational, delivering the cutting-edge CGI goods auds want and expect. It will be hard to watch "Earthquake'' ever again after this one.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
2012 isn't a bad movie that, out of sheer boredom, you might snicker at once or twice; it's a two-and-a-half hour laugh riot that plays on our expectations of the genre by anticipating and exceeding them.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
As you might suspect, the 2012 dialogue is pure Velveeta.
Read Full Review >New Orleans Times-Picayune Mike Scott
For all of its faults, ends up being relentlessly watchable as well, a summertime popcorn spectacle plopped down in the middle of the fall movie season.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
God forgive me, but I enjoyed the nerve-racking silliness of this newest, loudest exercise in destruction.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
For visual noise by the ton, Emmerich is my kind of hack, the pluperfect blend of leaden self-seriousness and accidental-on-purpose self-satirist.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Farber
Eye-popping special effects ensure that this movie will be a smash hit, and while it's entertaining for most of its excessive running time, the cheesy script fails to live up to the grandeur of the physical production.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Any sentient viewer will be able to predict every lumpy twist of this ludicrous, fitfully enjoyable movie.
Read Full Review >St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams
This long, ludicrous soap opera is also a mighty spectacle, a new standard in disengaged destruction.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
This film that imagines the end of the world not as a whimper but as an implosion is a preposterously diverting, instantly forgettable, big-screen video game.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
As far as the new disaster film 2012 is concerned, the world will end with both a bang and a whimper, the bang of undeniably impressive special effects and the whimper of inept writing and characterization. You pays your money, you takes your chances.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan
Although 2012 is what they call "critic-proof," it's not immune to analysis. It depicts a world where no one, man or God, has much say in what happens to the planet, and where the survival of one family outweighs the deaths of billions.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
2012 is totally, certifiably nuts, without being quite as off-the-wall kitschy as Emmerich's last special-effects extravabanzoo, "10,000 BC."
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The movie is an undeniable visual spectacle, but just as unequivocally a cheesy, ridiculous story.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Rick Kisonak
If characters with more than one dimension, a plausible story and some sort of viewpoint are moviegoing musts, you may leave 2012 feeling a tad shortchanged.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
Doomsday views are a knockout, but the script is a real disaster.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Chuck Wilson
The two-hour-and-40-minute 2012 is overstuffed with special-effects, but the Curtis clan's mad dash out of town is the closest the movie gets to actually being fun.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The last 40 minutes test your patience -- and intelligence -- in a way the rest of this big, dumb, crazy movie never does:
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
The result is a state-of-the-art multiplex three-ring circus whose special effects stagger the senses and play like a video game, whose human drama aims for the cosmic and lands waist-deep in the Big Silly.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
It occurred to me that Emmerich and Co. might be playing this whole thing for laughs. It probably occurred to them, too.
Read Full Review >Time Out New York Joshua Rothkopf
The set pieces are grand—gloriously dumb and never realistic enough to make you wince at the fact that billions of microscopic souls are dying before your eyes. Rather, you wince at everything else.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Despite the frenetic action scenes, the movie sags, done in by multiple story lines that undercut one another and by the heaviness of its conceit.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Where else are you going to get a chance to see the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy drift down the side of a mile-high tsunami and take out the White House? Big. Dumb. Fun.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Perhaps the strangest thing about 2012 is that the bad parts of the film are among the most enjoyable, because they're so over-the-top ridiculous that it's impossible not to break out laughing.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Operates in a dead zone roughly equidistant between parody and idiocy. You do get the connection between tongue and cheek, but much of the humor still goes thud.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Emmerich’s main achievement is to take a bunch of excellent actors, including Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Woody Harrelson, and to prevent all of them--with the exception of Oliver Platt and a pair of giraffes--from giving a decent performance.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Beware 2012, which works the dubious miracle of almost matching "Transformers 2" for sheer, cynical, mind-numbing, time-wasting, money-draining, soul-sucking stupidity.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
As always in Emmerich's rollicking Armageddons, the cannon speaks with an expensive bang, while the fodder gets afforded nary a whimper. Of course, that's just part of disaster's simple recipe: Blow us up, then blow us off.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
2012 is ultimately only about finding new ways to topple monoliths. Only they don’t feel that new.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.6 (out of 10) based on 276 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Captain Nemo gave it a0:
Two... hundred... million dollars! FOR THIS?! After stopping it twice, I finally watched it through to the end simply through morbid curiosity, and now I'm genuinely infuriated at it! I'm going to the DVD store and asking the shy timid counter boy for my money back at full volume!!! Then I'm going to buy all the copies they have and BURN them in a fire out the front of the shop so that the stupidity doesn't spread any further. Then I'm going to find out where the director, the writer AND the producers live and have them all savaged by starving komodo dragons until only their molars remain.... Every terrible cliche was there... the black president, the doombringer scientist, some idiot saying "By God.... That's impossible!", the lowly scientist being sent straight to meet the President, the useless divorced husband winning the wife and kids back.... I am now certifiably down to 50 IQ points with the rest of the people who watched this piffle. They should rename it "Daddy Runs From Armageddon" in reference to the six, count them, SIX times Cusack drives a car, a plane, a campervan or whatever.. out of the incoming firestorm/wave/pig stampede. It now tops my list as the worst movie I've ever seen.
S Rowe gave it a0:
Nearly as bad as "Speed 2". For example, the family just make it into a plane and just manage to take off, and just avoid falling buidlings / trees / mountains in the plane - 3 times. It was like de ja vu all over again.
Eli J. gave it a1:
I don't know why the main characters have to dodge death twenty times in the movie. Its a disaster movie so i'd expect one or two times where death is avoided only by a few feet...but wow it felt like every other scene in this movie. i'll give it a score of 1 because the special effects were pretty cool. the writing and acting were terrible though. why is there always some snotty kid who calls his father by his real name? that right there, is the question.
Alan G gave it a10:
C'mon people! The average is 5.7?! Anyone who gave it below a 7 is an idiot! This movie was the bomb! One of my favorite movies of '09!!
Mr L gave it a0:
Oh my god so horrible boring, action with this horrible patriotic we will save everyone feeling, sorry but fire loud and boomboom with expensive special effects is not exiting in this setting. today not acceptable anymore.
Jack S. gave it a4:
I give this movie a 4. Why because it focuses way to much on the special effects and way to little on the story and character. You barely get to any characters. The only character they really tell you about is Jackson Curtis. Other characters like Charlie and the U.S President made the movie exciting, but the others just made it crappy. Don't go and see this movie. It would be a waste of you time.
schwein h gave it a5:
Totally ridiculous, constantly 1 second ahead of utter disaster time after time, but the special effects are remarkable, and it kept me amused. Worth a watch. Once.
