In adventure movies you can typically count on the main character coming out alive. Because of this, directors of these films have to focus on the task not of pulling their star out of harrowing situations but of creating situations that are themselves fun, creative, or new. Though on its surface 2012 is an apocalypse film, in execution it is nothing more than an adventure movie based on a character, Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), narrowly escaping death over and over. This is a problem because writer/director Roland Emmerich can only come up with one or two unique situations for him to escape. For this reason, unless you’re prone to falling for the same trick no matter how many times it is played on you, 2012 is a long way to spend two and a half hours.

For some reason, neutrinos from the sun are mutating and causing the Earth’s core to heat greatly. This causes worldwide devastation on an apocalyptic scale. Massive earthquakes rock the very crust of the Earth, tsunamis demolish entire countries, and Yellowstone National Park literally explodes. We follow Curtis, a divorced limo driver, who, by the grace of Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser, knows the exact people he needs to know to have a chance at surviving the end of the world. It's not that he's rich, famous, or even crafty; he's just really, really lucky.

Curtis’s connections are so coincidental it is ridiculous. After he races through the literally falling-apart city to make it to the private airport with his children, Lilly and Noah (Get it? Noah? End of the world?); his ex-wife, Kate; and her boyfriend, Gordon, he finds that the pilot he hired is dead. Apparently Kate’s boyfriend, Gordon, is a total moron because it takes Kate reminding him, “Gordon, you can fly!” to get him to realize that he has a chance at saving them. It just so happens that Curtis recently met a conspiracy theorist with a map to a giant, top-secret ark, so they fly to Yellowstone to acquire said map from him, only to find that the ark is located in China. Alas, their little plane cannot make it to China, so they fly as far as they can, land, and, as luck (read: Emmerich) would have it, run across Curtis’s billionaire client, Yuri, who has a plane and a pilot but who needs a co-pilot. Apparently Gordon is an even bigger moron than we thought because he responds by trying to convince Yuri that he cannot fly because he has had only two flying lessons. They drag him into the cockpit anyway and head to China to try to sneak aboard the ark (admission on that thing costs a fortune!) and, with a little ... luck, survive the apocalypse.

During all of this, we are presented with scene after scene of the main characters, and especially Curtis, barely escaping death. Every single time a plane takes off with them in it, the runway crumbles inches behind them, they don’t get quite enough speed, they dip off the end of the runway, and they brush the top of a mountain, cliff, or building as they ascend. For Curtis's part, he dodges cars and jumps a riff in his limo, navigates a fireball storm and jumps another riff in a camper (!), climbs a cliff after his family thinks he’s fallen to his death, and jumps aboard an airplane seconds before it takes off, just to name a few close calls. At the end of the movie, he has to swim underwater to retrieve something stuck in the gears that close the door to the ark. I won’t spoil whether he comes out alive. If these events were inventive, they would be fun to watch, but only one or two of them are original or dynamic in any way. Likewise, during each of these scenes and many others, any degree of suspense would require us to believe that Emmerich has the guts to kill off his main character. By the time the director has given Curtis’s camper the ability to fly, his potential willingness to kill any non-evil main character falls under the highest doubt by even the most naive filmgoers. Needless to say, few scenes in this movie are actually exciting.

Undermining the excitement even further, Emmerich lacks the fortitude to consistently uphold any sense of dismay and constantly turns to comedic relief to keep audiences comfortable. Whether it’s a well-timed middle finger, slowly-driving old ladies, or Woody Harrelson’s butt crack, there is always something up Emmerich’s sleeve to help us take our minds off the horror of the deaths of billions. This is yet another sign that the director does not really care about the end of the world in his end-of-the-world movie. If that were the case, he would want us feel the sadness and terror of such a disaster. Instead, he distracts us from it. What’s important to him is seeing how close he can bring Curtis to the next chasm without him falling off.

There is one good scene in 2012. The first time Curtis and crew take off in a plane, they fly through the city in its phase of full collapse. They look out of the plane to see skyscrapers toppling into one another, cars rolling off tilted parking decks, pedestrians getting knocked into recently-formed suburban canyons, and office workers dangling from upper floors of split buildings. It is a harrowing and fully realized spectacle. The scale and detail of the event seem to appeal to a primal desire to see civilization crumble. There are a few other moments when the special effects create an awe-inspiring display, but this is the only one that Emmerich commits to fully enough to let it play without too many close calls on Curtis (and even this scene has a few of those).

2012 is for those who, in grade school, would look up when you tell them there’s a gullible on the ceiling. Even if there was someone watching this who had never seen a movie before, Emmerich uses the same trick so many times that after the first hour no reasonable human could believe that the next obstacle is going to claim the life of the main character. This would not be so bad if the movie was focused on the concept of the world as we know it coming to an end, but that idea is hardly addressed. This movie is about seeing how a director can set up characters and events precisely enough to get a random guy from the United States to China while the world is falling apart, blowing up, and flooding all around him. I’ve said the following about one or two other movies in my time, but in the case of 2012 it is truer than ever: Watch the trailer, and you’ve seen all the good parts of the film.