It was an unsuspecting Friday night when I got the text-message, “Come see 2012! It will be fantastic!”

“Questionable,” I thought to myself.

Then I took one good look at my desk and the pile of Friday night reading, beckoning from the dark sturdy wood, and suddenly even the apocalypse seemed more enticing. The world is going to end in 2012 — well if the Mayans said it, it must be true.

Now the first thing I have to clear up is the one tiny detail that annoys everyone who is remotely aware of our present calendar. Why exactly, would Hollywood release a movie entitled 2012 in 2009. Well kids, it’s not just so you can spend the next three years raiding grocery stores, obsessively amassing a stockpile of canned food in your bomb shelter. You see, most cleverly, said movie begins in an unsuspecting village in India in 2009 where a humble Indian scientist discovers the ominous reality of the enormous sun storms that erupt. Yes, you got it, if the Earth were the Wicked Witch of the West, it’d be screaming “I’m melting! I’m melting!” (From the inside). Basically, the sun storms cause our core to heat up like woah and then the Earth’s crust starts to make like a puzzle and split, rupturing in all kinds of crazy places (Arnold himself makes a televised appearance to calm the masses right before California falls into the ocean).

There are other ways we know that it’s 2009: for example, the President of the United States is African American, and the Chinese are depicted as the only race capable of constructing the super high-tech arks that would make Noah jealous. Notably, New York City is left entirely out of the destruction. We all know how much Hollywood generally enjoys employing CG pyrotechnics and special effects to destroy the Big Apple on the silver screen, but Roland Emmerich got the memo it just ain’t funny anymore. So he chose the other coast instead.

I would love to say that 2012 is entirely without a political agenda, but let’s be real here. Any time the director is savvy enough to emphasize our latest elected African-American leader and consciously avoid the destruction of New York City; the “political” light bulbs in your noggin should start flashing rapidly. Emmerich’s specialty is not exactly what I would call “all that is deeply subtle and profound.” The movie works hard to play up the power of the world’s minorities. Chiwetal Ejiofor’s character, Adrian Helmsley (you might recognize him from Love Actually, Inside Man or American Gangster), is a naïve scientific advisor to the President who, with the help of the Indian scientist, brings the global crisis to the forefront of political attention. He quickly learns that the government has its own agenda to silence those individuals who know too much about the impending cataclysm and that some key players are perishing because the government does not believe them to be of significant importance. Slowly but surely, we are made aware that only the upper-class have the necessary means to buy themselves a chance at a new life. (Allegory for health insurance, maybe?) Adrian Helmsley then finds himself making a decision that could cost him the extinction of the human race; with everything on the line, he must choose to decide how much human grit he has and recognize the power of his single voice.

The only question I have about this whole race issue is: Why are the Russians conspicuously present for every Hollywood apocalypse? Armageddon much? It must be the accents.

With such fantastically conspicuous symbolism (makes us Lit majors jump in joyous rapture), such a traumatic global event is made a little lighter with ridiculous comic relief. In a lover’s quarrel in a super market (I dare to venture a guess that we’ve all had at least one major public fight in our lives) one character shouts at another, “I just feel like there’s something pulling us apart!” Cue rupturing of the ground between them. Of course, there is also the inevitable Shakespearean insertion: a crazy man (Woody Harrelson) is the film’s token wise fool, chilling in Yellowstone Park in a trailer, who despite his guise of insanity is the one who provides our heroes with the map they need to find safety, and access the truths about the ending of the world. Last but not least, we are presented with the most profound inversion: a rupturing of the world bonds a broken family (aw!). After all, it’s pretty clear that according to Emmerich, it’s compassion that makes us human. So you just remember that, world.