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By Maggie Scott

Park your brain at the concession stand while you order that double tub of popcorn you’re going to need to fill that open mouth you’ll have watching the jaw-dropping, pulse-pounding 2012.

You won’t need the gray matter because director Roland Emmerich is aiming straight at your gut with some of the most horrifying images of destruction yet devised without bothering much with scientific veracity.

Featuring the hallmarks of disaster films of yore, co-screenwriter Emmerich gathers the typical types of characters who exhibit the best and worst of human nature when faced with annihilation pitted this time against implacable forces of nature: solar flares, planetary alignment, mutating neutrinos, crust displacement, destabilizing tectonic plates and magnetic pole reversal.

Heading the cast of heroes and villains is Jackson Curtis, a writer (John Cusack) regretting his divorce since his son Noah (Liam James) seems to prefer Gordon, the plastic surgeon boyfriend (Tom McCarthy) of Jackson’s ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet); and his daughter Lilly (Morgan Lily) still has to wear pull-ups to bed.

Sounding the alarm for the impending apocalypse to Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), the snarky Chief of Staff to President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover), is geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor).  Wilson informs world leaders at the 2009 G8 Summit that “the world as we know it will soon come to an end,” and the impossible ensues—there is not one leak to the rest of the world of its imminent demise.

For three years while enterprising capitalists are bankrolling the construction of several “arks” which they hope will save their gold-plated hides, the rest of the world appears to go about its un-panicked business, dodging the cracks and ducking the tremors.

Until the day the Mayans calculated centuries ago was the day the world would end.  On that day, Jackson is with his kids in Yellowstone National Park.  Not such a good thing, since below the surface of its pristine beauty is a volcanic caldera doomsday prophet Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) knows will detonate in a 30-mile-wide eruption.  Once he’s convinced by Helmsley of the danger, Curtis swings into eye-popping action. He grabs Kate, the kids and Gordon and zooming out of disintegrating L.A., back to Yellowstone for Charlie’s map that will show them the location of the arks, and on to Las Vegas, where they realize, they’re “going to need a bigger plane,” if they’re going to make it to China (where surging oceans will lap half-way up the Himalayas) and the waiting arks.

This nervously hilarious reference to Jaws is made just about the time you realize it’s useless to take this film seriously, although parents should think very seriously before they take their pre-teen kids to it. When the distraction of watching people and real estate get obliterated turns into the suspense of watching people and machines save the day, the guilty pleasure of staring at death turns into the uplifting satisfaction of seeing man refuse to abandon his fellow man, even when the odds appear overwhelming.

Besides Harrelson’s wild-eyed Frost, other break-the-tension supporting characters include a Russian billionaire (Zlatko Buric), his two imperious kids, his sassy girlfriend (Beatrice Rosen) and her saucy dog.  Columbia Pictures presentation rated PG-13 for intense disaster sequences, strong language and apocalyptic violence.

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