Positive Reviews
16%
Negative Reviews
84%
2012 - Critics
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Critics' Scores & Analysis
Critics' Reviews of 2012
- 100
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.
Reviewed by Mick LaSalle
- 100
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.
Reviewed by Dan Kois
- 88
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.
Reviewed by Roger Ebert
- 80
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.
Reviewed by Todd McCarthy
- 80
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.
Reviewed by Dana Stevens
- 75
As you might suspect, the 2012 dialogue is pure Velveeta.
Reviewed by Lou Lumenick
- 75
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.
Reviewed by Mike Scott
- 75
God forgive me, but I enjoyed the nerve-racking silliness of this newest, loudest exercise in destruction.
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
- 70
Spectacular CGI disasters.
Reviewed by Cliff Doerksen
- 70
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.
Reviewed by Stephen Farber
- 70
Any sentient viewer will be able to predict every lumpy twist of this ludicrous, fitfully enjoyable movie.
Reviewed by Richard Corliss
- 63
This long, ludicrous soap opera is also a mighty spectacle, a new standard in disengaged destruction.
Reviewed by Joe Williams
- 63
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.
Reviewed by Carrie Rickey
- 50
2012 is totally, certifiably nuts, without being quite as off-the-wall kitschy as Emmerich's last special-effects extravabanzoo, "10,000 BC."
Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek
- 50
The movie is an undeniable visual spectacle, but just as unequivocally a cheesy, ridiculous story.
Reviewed by Claudia Puig
- 50
Doomsday views are a knockout, but the script is a real disaster.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Weitzman
- 50
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.
Reviewed by Chuck Wilson
- 50
The last 40 minutes test your patience -- and intelligence -- in a way the rest of this big, dumb, crazy movie never does:
Reviewed by Rene Rodriguez
- 50
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.
Reviewed by Ty Burr
- 50
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.
Reviewed by Rick Kisonak
- 50
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.
Reviewed by Kenneth Turan
- 50
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.
Reviewed by Marc Mohan
- 45
Say this for Roland Emmerich's latest movie: It IS a disaster.
Reviewed by Bob Mondello
- 42
It occurred to me that Emmerich and Co. might be playing this whole thing for laughs. It probably occurred to them, too.
Reviewed by Peter Rainer
- 40
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.
Reviewed by Joshua Rothkopf
- 40
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.
Reviewed by Manohla Dargis
- 40
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.
Reviewed by Marc Savlov
- 38
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.
Reviewed by James Berardinelli
- 30
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.
Reviewed by Anthony Lane
- 25
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.
Reviewed by Rick Groen
- 25
2012 is ultimately only about finding new ways to topple monoliths. Only they don’t feel that new.
Reviewed by Keith Phipps
- 25
Beware 2012, which works the dubious miracle of almost matching "Transformers 2" for sheer, cynical, mind-numbing, time-wasting, money-draining, soul-sucking stupidity.
Reviewed by Peter Travers