Advance buzz for director Roland Emmerich's 2012 has not been very good, but it seems that if you don't take his third blow-up-the-world pic too seriously, it isn't bad.
"This is fun. 2012 delivers what it promises, and since no sentient being will buy a ticket expecting anything else, it will be, for its audiences, one of the most satisfactory films of the year."
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"...God forgive me, but I enjoyed the nerve-racking silliness of this newest, loudest exercise in destruction."
— Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
"If you rolled every disaster movie into one spectacular package, you would wind up with something close to 2012, Roland Emmerich's latest apocalyptic fantasy."
— Stephen Farber, Hollywood Reporter
"On any level other than as sheer visual sensation, 2012 is a joke, for the simple reason that it has no point of view; the film offers no philosophical, metaphysical, intellectual and certainly no religious perspective on the cataclysm, just the physical frenzy of it all."
— Todd McCarthy, Variety
"It goes without saying that people do not watch Godzilla movies for their human protagonists' exhibition of bravery in the face of certain peril but rather to enjoy said peril. They also don't go to disaster movies asking to be browbeaten by a hack director with an obscene amount of money and an incredible special-effects crew."
— Simon Abrams, Slant Magazine