Perhaps there’s something severely warped about my sense of humour (as if we didn’t know that already), but, for the past thirty minutes, I’ve been watching and rewatching these five minutes of 2012 footage while pointing and laughing hysterically. Somehow, these protagonists both drive and fly through a series of collapsing buildings, all the while narrowly missing explosions and barely staying ahead of the rapidly opening ground. Of course, what we really have here is a crapload of special effects that are complimented by intermittent freak-out reactions from John Cusack. Perhaps it’s the gin & tonic speaking to me at the moment, but this CGI shit really seems to have reached unprecedented heights of unbelievability.

2012 is directed, naturally, by Roland Emmerich, who brought us the woefully manipulative Independence Day (1996), which forever cemented Will Smith as a perpetual action movie hero/antihero, and The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which featured a ridiculous eye-of-the-superstorm that instantaneously freezes entire cities as it crosses the northern hemisphere. Hell, this is a director who craps a blockbuster every morning before breakfast. Yet, to say that Emmerich doesn’t realize the meaning of subtlety would be to entirely miss the point here, for he acknowledges and then spits upon carefully considered cinematic moments of nuance. In direct contrast, Michael Bay looks the little kid stomping upon plastic wrapping bubbles and forlornly holding a solitary sparkler while he watches a massive fireworks display from afar. In other words, Megan Fox as opposed to Arnold Schwarznegger, not that either one could coax me voluntarily into a theater at this very moment.