We are obsessed with our own destruction. Somehow, perhaps, we know we can’t keep cutting down rainforests, driving vehicles with single-digit MPGs or allowing Disney to keep unleashing clones of Raven and Miley upon us. How do these societal fears of worldly limits curbing our unlimited desires manifest themselves? In fiction. The big screen. Lots of CGI.

Really though? To test the hypothesis, let’s look at two different trends of the world gone under (and we’re not talking Crocodile Dundee IV, either).

Flash back to 1998. You have the uncanny Hollywood phenomenon of two rival films with similar subject matter duking it out. First, there was the comet catastrophe film Deep Impact, and its bloated Michael-Bay-helmed porn star of a cousin, Armageddon. Both films involved the imminent collision of a planet-killing ’roid and the subsequent heroics of us puny Earthlings. Both films wove in the requisite drama of unrealistically good looking actors and actresses doe-eying each other to the death as representations of human beings searching for meaning in the face of irrevocable destiny.

Armageddon expected the audience to assume a few more things to suspend their disbelief: that an 800-mile wide behemoth wouldn’t be noticed by astronomers until the Space Shuttle exploded by surprise, that oil drillers played by Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck could be trained to stop said hulking object by drilling a few feet into a fault-line in less than a month and that the world would look to the U.S. to save it, by sending a bunch of undisciplined and psychotic cowboys to space with no training in super-ships with the maneuverability of the Millennium Falcon.

Deep Impact took a few more risks. It took the stance that the powers that be would for some reason not want to cause widespread anarchic chaos and would keep astronomical discovery of an approaching comet secret. The world does find out, as journalists are still employed, and lo and behold, it’s the U.S. to the rescue again, with a multi-tiered plan involving astronauts attempting to detonate the comet (and refreshingly failing the first time, blowing it in half), along with the idea of an Ark, a refuge in which select members of society are to survive. Morgan Freeman plays a black president. And by gum, one of the comets actually hits. How’s that for a bittersweet ending?

Roland Emmerich ripped off these two films and his own Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow to create an epic 3-hour mishmash called 2012. The director’s last film was pretentiously called 10,000 B.C. He sure loves dates — maybe they indicate the suddenness of a moment when the whole world can change. But it is this rushed feeling of doom and the gargantuan way of destroying the world that makes his films almost comical. The insignificant storylines of under-thought characters culminated well in Independence Day, but 2012 just rehashes its four preceding films.

So what do we find in these films? Epic disaster? Check. Complete lack of plausibility? Check. People outrunning things they shouldn’t/couldn’t, like the cold (wtf seriously) or in this case volcanic magma bombs and atomic shockwaves (seriously wtf? WTF?). Oh, and a black president? Check.

Aside from retreading all too familiar crumbling ground (throw in The War of the Worlds for good measure), 2012 is one ridiculous close call after another, repeatedly, for three hours. Planes fly up as the world crumbles around and over them, because gravity doesn’t exist in the apocalypse. Every limo escape scene looks like a frenzied game of Crazy Taxi. There’s even a scene of a huge donut display rolling around, just like the video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication.” Except the cartoon video looked more real. The whole thing was like the invasion scene in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds on loop with Transformers 2 as a soundtrack. Is it an entertaining spectacle? Sure. Watching an RV outrun an eruption in Dolby is not something one sees every day.

Alas, the movie takes a serious turn (although one ripped right of Deep Impact) when the question of who to save comes up. There are Arks in this film too. Only the privileged get seats, and even all of them can’t make it because of the damn countdown timer (the world simply ending isn’t enough source of tension, it has to end in a matter of minutes). Why the sanctimonious, moralizing speech about preserving humanity and letting on a few extra rich tax-dodgers? The ethical issue is that when an apocalypse comes, humans will have to own up to natural selection. Every painful competition of daily life, from winning parking spaces to job promotions to scoring one-nighters in bars, will be magnified to the end result no one wants to think about. The movie forgets all about the little people like the Indian scientist who discovers the bullshit reason the world’s about to explode (not without milking his death for an easy tear) and uses the audience’s secret hope that we, the masses, won’t be the ones left to die. It uses that hope to fuel its decisions. The happy ending is unearned. The family reunited is a hollow victory for humanity.

We watch disaster movies for the rollercoaster of seeing everything we know go boom, with the hope that everyone we love (especially ourselves) makes it to the end with John Cusack and Amanda Peet, because we’re as cute and lovable as those two. But contrast all those big, bad movies with the richer tradition of low-key, post-apocalyptic films — films that eschew the big-budget disaster scenes for the truly human element of surviving after the world goes to shit. Films following the tradition of Mad Max, trying to understand the bits and pieces of junkyard society that we can salvage and rebuild what makes us human. Films like I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, Children of Men, even Zombieland, and especially the upcoming films The Book of Eli and The Road. What thrills us might be the spectacle of watching it all blow up ever so loudly and the hollow hope that the John Cusacks among us live on. But what stays with us long after the fake-butter popcorn is tossed out is that desperate vision of pressing on into the night, the lonely lights in a darkened world that didn’t survive.