People of the earth, buckle up, director Roland Emmerich has returned to destroy the world again. And unlike in “Independence Day” or “The Day After Tomorrow,” this time the Mayans have given us the exact date when we’re all going to die.

The budget for Emmerich’s latest sabotaging of the planet—$260 million—is more than the total of those for his previous two efforts. And you can see where every dollar of it went. Unfortunately, little of it was spent on the script. The apparent scientific explanation given for the end of the world is a bunch of mumbo jumbo about abnormal sun activity microwaving the earth. Meanwhile, failed novelist Jackson Curtis (played by a neurotic John Cusack) accidentally discovers that the government has secretly built a special shelter ship that only elites are allowed on. It’s down to Jackson to somehow save his broken family from going down with the rest of humanity.

The clichéd Hollywood plot aside, there are plenty of awesome special effects to feast your eyes on. Earthquakes, volcano eruptions, tsunamis and floods are all rolled into one disaster movie, which takes us from Las Vegas to Rome to New Deli. One particular scene in which a jet carrying the Curtis family flies through a crumbling Los Angeles takes the audience on an incredible roller coaster ride. But Emmerich saves the best catastrophe for last.

Cusack turns in a solid performance as the reluctant hero, as does Woody Harrelson as a cuckoo conspiracy theorist. The same goes for the rest of the cast, who play a multi-ethnic array of characters including an Indian scientist, a Russian oligarch, a Tibetan monk and an African-American US President.
If we’re all eventually doomed, I guess it’s worth spending $260 million to capture it on the big screen.

3/5 Stars by Penny Zhou.

(USA) Directed by Roland Emmerich. Starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson. Category IIA, 158 minutes.