“2012” is director Roland Emmerich’s third try at destroying the world (fourth if you count “Godzilla’s” romp across Manhattan) and he’s getting better with practice.

The film takes its title from the date the ancient Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world. It turns out—thanks to prodigious solar flares and the rain of neutrinos they send zapping through the earth’s molten core—the Mayans have made a pretty good guess.

Cut to a group of sweaty scientists huddled around geothermal measurement instruments deep in an abandoned copper mine in India. They have just discovered that those neutrinos are heating up the earth’s core to the point where planet’s crust has come unglued and continents are going to start bobbing around and crumbling like soup crackers in chowder. This is bad news for civilization as we know it, but Christmas came early for Emmerich and his animation team.

Emmerich has an appetite for the apocalyptic like no other director around today and he has raised it to an art form. His grand panoramas of obliterating landscapes aren’t set pieces but jazz riffs. He likes to zip along with the flow of destruction tracking an RV racing down a road in Yellowstone National Park while bits of a volcanic eruption use it for target practice or a small plane weaving through a canyon of skyscrapers as they topple into one another.

It’s heady stuff and Emmerich juices each scene with unexpected flourishes. It’s not just molten rocks pelting our hapless little Winnebago but occasionally an entire fragment of landscape—complete with trees and underbrush—lands with a whump creating a brand new hillock.

It’s obvious that Emmerich is having a lot of fun and he keeps finding excuses to pull us into another race against destruction while the Himalayas are drowned in tidal waves and Hawaii is flambéed like cherries jubilee. Like most thrill-ride directors he flirts with overstaying his welcome and has to figure out reasons for us to care.

It’s in the caring department that Emmerich’s exhuberant directing style feels asthmatic and begins to wheeze a bit. When it comes to building a plot around his free-form animation sequences, Emmerich is surprisingly formulaic. “2012” follows the same plot construction as “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow”: A scientist discovers the secret to earth’s impending destruction and sets off to convince the powers that be to take action. Meanwhile, a family finds itself in peril and the bulk of the film follows their journey towards salvation.

Emmerich doesn’t direct people as well as he directs volcanoes and he relies heavily on the inherent likeability of his actors. With “2012” he’s made some very fortunate casting choices. John Cusack and Amanda Peet star as a separated couple that end up racing with their kids, Liam James and Morgan Lily, from L.A. to Yellowstone to Las Vegas and on to China always a step ahead of the ever widening geologic abyss. None of the actors are working very hard but they make for such a sweet family that by the time the movie gets going you really would rather they not be squished like bugs. Cusack makes the best of whatever humor can be gleaned from the weak dialogue and there are plenty of times during the 158 minutes of running time that you’re grateful for his efforts. There is a very small scene where he freeloads the last beer off a conspiracy theorist played by Woody Harrelson that is a gem of understated humor in what is otherwise a gravel pit of ham-handed sentimentality.

Woody Harrelson has a lot of fun has the film’s resident weirdo while Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, and Oliver Platt do respectable work with the pile of clichés that pass for a script.

There are two reasons to see this film. First, with the coming of “Avatar,” “2012” could well represent the last example of a generation of computer animation that will be swept away by a huge leap in technological firepower—the last buffalo standing alone on the prairie, so to speak.

Secondly, if you know any eight-year-old boy (or were once one yourself) who liked to take that cute little toy sailboat the grandparents bought him down to the pond and throw big rocks at it, take him to this movie. He’ll love you for it.

You can view a trailer of “2012” on the web at:
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3253077017/

Directed by Roland Emmerich
Rated PG-13
(Two stars)