You’ve got to hand it to Roland Emmerich. Only he could give us the end of the world and still make it seem OTT. In a film of gargantuan length, gargantuan visual proportions and a gargantuan budget (a reputed 260,000,000 USD), by the end you begin to believe in a Hollow Earth theory, only not the one that immediately springs to the minds of Forteans. You know where that money went. It went on the vast array of special effects the film renders: cities toppling into huge chasms across the fissuring Earth; pyroclastic volcanic cataclysms in Yellowstone obliterating swathes of forest; freeway flyovers tilting from the horizontal and tipping cars like M&Ms off an upturned table top; skyscrapers doing likewise, only now spilling countless white-collar workers off sliding office floors gashed open to the sky; and more tsunamis than you will find sloshing around Pamela Anderson’s Friday night Biblical flood of a bubble bath.

To mention that it is The End of the World (as we know it) is not to break the unwritten code of reviewing by giving the plot away, because there isn’t one. Unless you class the same old reheated ham cobblers with cornbread on the side about dysfunctional (American) family finding harmony once more amid eco-disaster land. This is microwaved meaning for the masses in which the vital ingredients of character nutrients and tasty dialogue are immolated in the process. There has been talk of some subtle allegorical political message for the fag-end Noughties embedded within, alluded to via brief glimpses of great novels (Moby Dick; The Grapes of Wrath etc.) in various scenes. The inclusion of Russian oligarchs, Saudi oil princes and their bloated wealth courtesy of Western capitalist greed models, an Italian prime minister rediscovering his moral compass, and the levelling of world-wide seats of power (including the White House) has a cumulative message: Oh, how the mighty are fallen. Unless, that is, you are mighty and rich enough (like Her Majesty and corgies) to get your hands on a ticket to ride on the ships being built (in China) to save those who can afford it, unbeknown to the great unwashed of the world, who aren’t and who can’t. Wait, I am getting ahead of myself here. There is a corkscrew tension to be wound round our senses: will failing humanity win out over almighty Mammon and unseemly self-preservation? Hmm, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it?

All this is all done the wrong way round. The central human interest plotline, the importance of the (American) nuclear family unit included (at the same time as the film’s socially relevant ‘concerns’ celebrate cultural difference and human diversity and pulling together as a species, sing it: “We are the world…”), feels squeezed into what scant fissures appear in the spectacle. And you’ve got to hand it to John Cusack – only he, as divorced father and failed novelist Jackson Curtis, could journey his way through The End of the World and make it seem like he doesn’t give a shit. The interchangeable nature of his Christian name and his surname suggests that screenplay writers Emmerich and Harald Kloser didn’t give a shit either. When dad is called upon to care, this is conveyed to the viewer by lots of running around and shouting, almost certainly ensuring that we don’t. Care that is, not run around and shout at what is being set before us. But then we are treated like cattle when it comes to this mega-blockbuster Hollywood film, a gigantic dumb beast whose state of lumbering stupefaction seems even greater than ours as we watch.

The title 2012 alludes to warnings supposedly worked out via another speculative ancient culture, not the Mayans that conventional history might grasp at, but the Mayans the alternative history movement grabbed hold of, with predictions of an apocalyptic event awaiting mankind on said date interpreted through the Mayan calendar. It is a topic long rife on burgeoning alternative history shelves. To the credit of some of those writers an air of unfolding mystery is created in their speculative tomes. In 2012 there is none. In a film that runs for almost three hours, this is perhaps Emmerich’s most astonishing achievement of all.

The 2012 apocalypse is well-trodden soil to Fortean readers, as is the Hapgood theory of Earth-crust displacement used in the film. This phenomenon is explained by the change caused by neutrinos, altered as a result of massive solar flares, which raise the temperature at the Earth’s core and result in the planet’s crust beginning to shift like the rind on an orange. The poles reverse, too. Needless to say, very messy. Peeling an orange usually is. There is surely science in there – way beyond my poor grey inner pate, I’ll admit. Of the obscure transcendental kind called Hollywood Science. All this is explained not by geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his Indian colleagues monitoring the temperature at the Earth’s core, but far more lucidly by Woody Harrelson’s shock jock conspiracy theory radio host Charlie Frost, who communicates it all with machine-gun babble and a wacky cartoon he put together to explain things on the Net. The cartoon is vaguely similar to the one in Jurassic Park. It is an indication that metatext is alive and well in Hollywood, as is the Frosty name nod to the big freeze of The Day After Tomorrow. Only Woody Harrelson could upstage The End of the World from the cramped confines of a camper van.

2012 contains mind-blowing special effects, but your mind is blown very early on and there is nothing in what follows to fill the vacant space that has been scooped out of your skull. I counted three hair’s-breadth escapes in aircrafts. VFX team: “We’ve done three. Which one do you want, Roland?” Roland Emmerich: “All of them”. All that matters to the bean counters is that this film recoups, and betters, its outlay. And it probably will. The tagline of the film is: We Were Warned. We were. And it asks of us: Who Will Survive? I did. Barely. Curtis’s failed novel is called Farewell Atlantis, a title loaded with elegiac meaning, to be sure. Whether it alludes to human civilisation in some way or only to Hollywood cinema, I remain uncertain.