There’s a direct line leading to 2012. Let’s call it the Roland Emmerich-continuum. Remember that scene in ID4 when the White House gets all blowed up? Well, Rollie got hooked. He needed more and more. He tried to off the whole world in The Day After Tomorrow, but he couldn’t go all the way. He still had an itch that needed to be scratched.

Consider it scratched.

2012 is dumb as hell. Everything takes place in a “Saved at the last second” fashion, and false heroism rules the day. There all so many things that don’t make sense, but in the end, that’s fine. What’s important here is the destruction: beautiful, mind-numbing destruction. Emmerich lets his imagination go wild as a crack in the sidewalk turns into a broken house turns into a gaping maw in the earth. Highways and cities and mountains all fall before his mighty hand.

Here’s the catch: There’s no going back. With Independence Day, all that had to happen was a simple dispatchment of the aliens, and life could go back to normal. There is no normal after the events of 2012. The social-psychological ramifications of this are buried under a third-tier romantic subplot. We can’t be bothered with what comes next. Once the carnage ends, we’re outta there.