Over the weekend my special ladyfriend and I took in a modest, small-budget, indie film documentary called 2012. If you live in a major metropolitan area or college town you should seek out a small art-house theater that, with any luck, might be screening this instant sleeper classic.

The premise of 2012 is simple: The ancient Mayan calendar predicts that the world will end on December 12, 2012, the (pseudo)scientific basis for which is causing much consternation for geophysical scientitian Adrian Helmsley, played with quiet intensity by Chiwetel Ejiofor. I know, I know—you’re probably as sick of hearing the name Chiwetel Ejiofor as I am, what with all the overexposure he received on the heels of his star turn in David Mamet’s big-budget mega-blockbuster Redbelt. It seemed one couldn’t go anywhere without seeing Chiwetel Ejiofor’s name on the marquee of every multiplex in the country. But try to set aside your distaste with the starmaking hype-cycle that created the ubiquitous Ejiofor, because I have a feeling that as much as Chiwetel Ejiofor might be a household name, he is more than just a pretty flash in the pan face.

Ejiofor hurries to Washington where No One Will Take Him Seriously and he is Not Dressed Appropriately To Be Taken Seriously By These Very Important Beltway Insiders, but he eventually gets the attention of the president’s chief of staff by handing him a very thin document that apparently contains all the information needed to convince every major world power that Shit Is Fucked And The Apocalypse Is Real, and that they need to cluster around their Sony Vaio™ laptops and take immediate action. The president’s chief of staff is played by Oliver Platt, whom I am always heartened to see in movies because I believe that Oliver Platt is who I would look like if I put on a few pounds and became overweight. Simply put, Oliver Platt is my fat twin, and I am comfortable having Oliver Platt as my fattelgänger because Oliver Platt is a handsome man. Oliver Platt.

Along the way, John Cusack is a limo driver for some reason who runs into Woody Harrelson, who in an impressive bit of acting against type plays a wild-eyed yet charismatic hippie. Woody Harrelson tells John Cusack all about the end of the world using a bit of Flash animation that he made for his conspiracy-theory blog. (“Download my blog,” Woody Harrelson actually says to John Cusack, which is hilarious because, how does one do that? It’s 2009/2012, Roland Emmerich, and the Internet is a household presence. You can’t just fancy up your dialogue by tossing in some Internet Terms like “download” and “hyperlink.” The average moviegoer knows that you do not “download a blog” anymore than you “log on to JavaScript to upload your email into a USB port,” Mom.)

John Cusack hurries to his ex-wife Amanda Peet’s house to rescue her and his children and her new boyfriend Thomas McCarthy, who since The Wire ended has left his post as an unethical journalist at the Baltimore Sun and become a Hollywood plastic surgeon. What follows is the film’s first action sequence, in which John Cusack drives a limo off of the state of California as it (the state of California) is falling into the ocean. I am not even exaggerating. When that is the first hand a director plays in a metaphorical card game that is a metaphor for a disaster movie, then you know the director is a Card Shark with a few Full Houses and Royal Flushes up his shark sleeves. Poker!

I can’t tell you much about the rest of the film without giving away some spoilers of APOCALYPTIC proportions, but suffice it to say that it’s pretty fucking awesome, and delivers many excellent Disaster Movie Tropes, including the Wholesale Destruction Of Major World Landmarks trope, the Divorced Protagonist Estranged From His Family trope (see: Deep Impact, War Of The Worlds, Mrs. Doubtfire) and the Noble Self-Sacrificing African-American President trope, embodied with true gravitas by Danny Glover. Hey, this film MUST BE science fiction, because hey look there’s a BLACK MAN in the WHITE HOUSE! Yeah, good luck making THAT a reality, Hollywood liberals! In your dreams!

ON A SERIOUS TIP, THOUGH: Before seeing this film, I wondered how many moviegoers were viewing 2012 ironically, assuming that I was one of them. But over the course of the film I realized that it’s impossible to view this movie ironically, since the movie’s pretty much in on the joke from the beginning (at one point Cusack says, “We’re gonna need a bigger plane”) and simply wants to deliver a sick bone-rattling slab of disaster porn. At several climactic points during the film I guffawed loudly while pumping my fist in the air, as my date sank further into her seat, and I realized that is exactly how I am expected to respond. There is no gap between enjoying 2012 ironically versus enjoying it sincerely when our warped, first-world pleasure centers are primed to receive 158 minutes of shit getting blown up, flooded, and crushed; where a divorced dad trying to win his way back into his kids’ hearts is given equal, if not greater, narrative weight than an entire third-world continent drowning in a tsunami. If you can’t get on board with that, then duh, don’t go.

On the way out of the theater, the female half of the couple behind us just kept muttering, “That was terrible. That was terrible!” In all fairness, she might have been dragged there by her boyfriend, but I do wonder what she was expecting. I mean, come on. We can’t all aspire to Carefully Considered Oscar-Worthy Exercises in Serious Art. We can’t all retain our integrity and be Sexes In The City and Twilights: New Moonses. You can have your respectable auteurs, some of whom drug and rape 13-year-old girls in the 1970s, and others of whom make Antichrist. You can have your Robert Altmans and Roman Coppolas and Tyler Perrys, and I will be content to watch John Cusack heroically save the world by holding a boom box over his head blaring Peter Gabriel outside the Apocalypse’s house.