The creative arts have always had an appetite for destruction. Artists from Hieronymus Bosch to Jake and Dinos Chapman have offered up their visions of the apocalypse, while even literature’s great inaction hero Hamlet eventually kicked arras and set off a series of petards that brought Elsinore’s walls tumbling down.

Director Roland Emmerich’s 2012 isn’t art or particularly creative, but it’s another example of mankind’s desire to depict our ultimate downfall. When a scientist discovers that solar flares of unprecedented magnitude are heating up the Earth’s core, he realises it’s only a matter of time before the planet splits itself apart. Confronted by this threat of global oblivion, the world’s leaders collaborate to devise a means of survival. Their solution is to construct giant arks that can carry a select few to safety, while the remainder of Earth’s population have to fend for themselves against a perfect storm of natural disasters.

2012 is the disaster movie to end all disaster movies. Forget Towering Inferno – in 2012, collapsing skyscrapers are just a minor background detail as the screen overflows with CGI carnage. Forget Titanic and The Poseidon Adventure – in 2012, a vessel the size of Brighton piledrives into Mount Everest. Forget Dante’s Peak – in 2012, the supervolcano in Yellowstone Park erupts with the loudest noise heard in 75,000 years and lays waste to the whole of North America. And you can even forget Emmerich’s own The Day After Tomorrow – 2012 boasts tsunamis that make the ones in his 2004 film resemble ripples in a duck pond.

In the same way that George Martin was known as the fifth Beatle, Emmerich has now devastated the planet on celluloid so many times he warrants the title of Fifth Horseman Of The Apocalypse. Yet 2012’s closest creative cousin may not be a movie at all, but the old-skool computer game Sim City. Anyone who’s played it will know that, after patiently constructing an idealised environment containing homes, hospitals, schools and transport hubs, there was an ever-tempting option to unleash a giant UFO that rained down laser beams with great vengeance and furious anger. Goodbye city, hello rubble. Curiously, while 2012’s special effects are technically impressive, they have an artificiality that makes you feel you’re watching the obliteration of an unreal world.

This artificiality isn’t helped by bizarre switches in tone, such as the jokey stunts that accompany the leveling of Hollywood. Maybe Emmerich is making some kind of arch observation about the phoney nature of Tinsletown, but I doubt it. A carnage-strewn disaster movie also needs sympathetic characters to raise the emotional stakes, but apart from John Cusack as loser dad Jackson Curtis (almost a carbon copy of Tom Cruise’s character in War Of The Worlds) there’s no one with any more depth than a pixel-generated Sim.

Jackson’s children have ringside seats at events that would carve inch-deep scars into the psyche of Indiana Jones and turn Jason Bourne into a quivering emotional wreck, yet in the midst of this babel and bedlam they retain a lexicon that rarely deviates far from ‘cool’, ‘sucks’ and ‘awesome’. Danny Glover is wasted as a US President who’s so kindly and full of homespun wisdom he makes Barack Obama look like Pol Pot, while Woody Harrelson phones in his role as a wide-eyed stoner eco-warrior and undoes the considerable goodwill he built up from his work in Zombieland.

On a brighter note, Emmerich continues his sentimental tradition of allowing a dog to escape certain disaster as millions of people perish all around it, while the destruction of the Vatican means that any surviving children will be able to sleep more safely in their beds. Unfortunately, Britain goes the way of all flesh as well, although the film makes the unforgivable error of referring to the London Olympics taking place that year when we all know they’ll never be ready in time. The idea that all of this planetary desecration was foretold by the Mayan Calendar is also difficult to swallow. How many Mayan Lottery winners do you know?

Unless your name is Arthur Dent and you’re whisked away from Earth à la Hitchhiker’s Guide just before it’s destroyed, this is the closest any of us will get to seeing our planet’s final days. So 2012 finds its niche as a dumb but enjoyable spectacle.

2012 (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) is out now.

Colin Houlson