2012-ΤΑLE OF THE APOCALYPSE

ON Nov. 13, when his latest tale of the apocalypse, “2012,” arrives in theaters, the filmmaker Roland Emmerich will have waged more assaults on this planet than he can remember. He’s frozen it, drowned it and sicced aliens and Godzilla on it. The earth is his Jason Voorhees from “Friday the 13th,” and it just keeps coming back.

Well, not after the pulverizing the earth takes in “2012.” “This is my last, quote-unquote, action-disaster movie,” Mr. Emmerich, the 53-year-old German director behind spectacles like “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” said in a telephone interview from his home in London. “I know I can’t destroy the world again. That would be kind of a joke.”
In this latest calamity, a monster solar flare shoots invisible neutrinos into the earth’s core, cooking it like a Hot Pocket. The seas rise. Tectonic plates shuffle. Volcanoes erupt. And every edifice and geographic landmark in their paths (save for a few sacred sites) is submerged, scorched or altogether shredded. Somehow the concepts of plot and character development — amid all the mayhem, John Cusack plays a failed novelist turned limo driver for a Russian oligarch — cling to dear life.
“You know what you’re getting when Roland Emmerich calls,” said Amanda Peet, who plays the ex-wife of Jackson (Mr. Cusack) as well as his partner in peril. “You’re not going to be like, ‘Can we go into my childhood in this?’ ”
“Roland,” she added, “knows exactly how much he wants it to be grounded in reality and how much he wants it to be a ride and a massive catharsis.”
Alien invaders, tsunamis and asteroids have crashed into Mr. Emmerich’s oeuvre since he first blew up the White House in 1996 with a blue death ray, in “Independence Day.” (Even the Discovery Channel followed suit with its own doomsday-theme reality series called “The Colony.”) So how exactly did he make “2012,” which he calls “the mother of all disaster movies”?
In “2012” Mr. Emmerich pits the accelerating entropy of the planet against a worldwide government conspiracy — Noah’s Ark meets “The X-Files.” And he tries to top his previous disaster movies by ratcheting up the scale of destruction in the film’s 157 minutes. (This time he lets the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, sitting in Chesapeake Bay, wipe out the White House.) He also slips in even more ridiculous jokes right before tragedy strikes. Gordon (Tom McCarthy) tells his love interest, Kate (Ms. Peet), “I feel like something is pulling us apart.” Then a gaping fissure opens between them in the aisle of the supermarket where they’re standing; it’s the beginning of an earthquake that eventually sends California sliding into the Pacific.
“It’s just a counterbalance to the suspense,” Mr. Emmerich said.
The comic relief and the suspense come at a breakneck speed in “2012,” as in all Emmerich movies. Characters race to set up their back stories at the same speed they later race to escape swelling oceans, falling buildings and cracks in the earth’s crust. In Mr. Emmerich’s films, audiences don’t wonder whether two people will kiss or make up but in what near-death scenario they’ll do it. As Jackson and Kate sit in a Bentley about to drop out of the back of a low-flying military cargo plane onto a plateau atop the Himalayas, for example, they have a breakthrough realization about their failed marriage.
Viewers might also recognize the archetypes Mr. Emmerich first defined in “Independence Day.” Mr. Cusack takes over from Jeff Goldblum as the reluctant hero. Ms. Peet replaces Vivica A. Fox as the strong mother. Randy Quaid’s portrayal of a loopy crop-duster and U.F.O. abductee is subbed out for Woody Harrelson’s recreational-vehicle-driving pirate-radio host and conspiracy theorist Charlie Frost. “The reason the film works is that you get sucked into the characters,” Mr. Cusack said in a phone interview. “Otherwise people would be comparing it to ‘Transformers.’ ”
Like “Transformers,” though, the effects in “2012” zip by so fast that they’re impossible to take in all at once. But the details in this $200 million production are actually there. As California sinks into oblivion, people can be seen clinging to crumbling concrete in falling high-rises. It’s all the result of work by 100 in-house visual artists at Uncharted Territory, the company owned by the “2012” co-producers and digital effects supervisors Volker Engel and Marc Weigert, in addition to artists at 14 other outside companies with specialties in simulating water, land, buildings or humans.
It took a room full of networked computers called a “render farm” to do in about 14 months what would have taken a single machine 16 years: churn out digital scenes precisely modeled after real life, Mr. Weigert and Mr. Engel said. Artists positioned the sun in the virtual sky, and dictated how every surface — metal, glass, wood or stone — would reflect rays and cast shadows. Teams installed virtual hinges in lampposts and etched thousands of fault lines into skyscrapers and houses so when simulated tremors or winds or waves were applied, a process called “simming,” they’d crumble or buckle in natural-looking ways.
Occasionally realism looked a little too boring. Data models, for example, told artists that their mile-high tsunami would take several minutes to roll over the Himalayas. The artists needed it to happen in 10 seconds.
Not lost on Mr. Emmerich was the potential outrage from showing realistic disasters hitting California, a state plagued by wildfires and earthquakes, or toppling city towers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Still, he pressed ahead with annihilation as usual: “If I cannot destroy a big high-rise anymore, because terrorists blew up two of the most famous ones, the twin towers, what does this say about our world?”