I enjoy the films of Roland Emmerich.

Okay, okay, before you start reaching for the butterfly nets and/or comments section, let me clarify: It's a conditional kind of almost-love, with full awareness of the general dunderheadedness of the filmmaker's body of work. Considerable Velveeta factor aside, though, the guy's a visually gifted, unabashedly middlebrow director who consistently delivers big, goofy epics about things blowing up real good, without any of the casual misogyny, smarm, or Genuine Draft sheen espoused by Michael Bay and his posse. (Or the spatial incoherence, for that matter: Emmerich is one of the few remaining blockbuster directors to understand that special effects lose much of their pop when you can't tell what the hell is going on.) If his cinematic sensibilities seem stuck at the level of an imaginative adolescent boy with a bunch of Tonka trucks and a crapload of M-80s, well, that's what pre-matinee booze is for.

2012, Emmerich's two-and-a-half-hour purported farewell to the disaster genre, is just ridiculous entertainment. Taking its cue from the predicted Mayan date of the end of the world (a scant 100 years before the galactic musical apocalypse prophesied by the band Rush), the plot posits a near future where solar radiation causes the Earth to boil over, with the last few survivors attempting to make it to some top-secret government arks before the whole thing goes kerflooey.

To their credit, Emmerich and cowriter Harald Kloser do their darndest to make this rampant hooey seem like an actual movie, with more than a few stabs at social commentary and even a couple of genuine character moments bubbling up between all of the explosions and eggheaded nattering about rising neutrino counts. Really, though, it's about a group of genially overqualified actors (including John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and an amped-even-for-him Woody Harrelson) barely outrunning—well, mostly outrunning—a series of increasingly spectacular fireballs, tsunamis, and runaway mountaintops. On that level—and all right, pretty much only on that level—Emmerich's magnum opus is a double-stuffed, hysterical success that demands to be seen on the biggest screen you can find. If you can keep from busting up during the part with the helicopter and the giraffe, you may be a robot.