April 22: Earth Day Ends Here — Instead of celebrating a holiday created by a murderer, share an end of the world disaster movie with us. But seriously, treat the planet right!

Director and writer Roland Emmerich said, “I always wanted to do a biblical flood movie, but I never felt I had the hook. I first read about the Earth’s crust displacement theory in Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods.”

In that book, Hancock states that a civilization near Antarctica left “fingerprints” in Ancient Egypt and other civilizations, such as the Olmec,s Aztecs and Mayans. Hancock believed that in 10,450 BC, a major pole shift took place that brought Antarctica closer to the South Pole, causing global destruction and sinking Atlantis. This is based on the Charles Hapgood’s theory of Earth Crustal Displacement, which has no geological experts supporting it, as the model that they follow is plate tectonics. There’s also a strange — well, isn’t there always — strange racist bent, as there is no way — according to the author — that “jungle-dwelling Indians” could not possibly come up with a sophisticated calendar and it had to be an master white race who taught them.

That same book also inspired Emerich’s 10,000 B.C.

This starts in 2009, as geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and astrophysicist Satnam Tsurutani (Jimi Mistry) determine that a new type of neutrino from a solar flare is heating the Earth’s core. Adrian alerts White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) and President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover), who start a plan to save humanity without warning them and causing a panic.

By the next year, forty-six nations are building nine arks in the highest point of the world, in the Himalayas, to be able to survive a new flood. Any major artifacts are stored in secure locations while the people in the mountains start to work on the arks, like Tenzin (Chin Han), the brother of Buddhist monk Nima (Osric Chau). The money comes from rich people, like Yuri Karpov (Zlatko Burić), a rich Russian who plans on saving his girlfriend Tamara Jikan (Beatrice Rosen) and his twin sons Alec and Oleg (Alexandre Haussmann and Philippe Haussmann).

Former science fiction writer Jackson Curtis (Jon Cusack) works for Yuri as his chauffeur.  The call to board the arks comes in, just as Jackson returns from a vacation with his kids Noah and Lilly (Liam James and Morgan Lily), getting them back to his ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and her new husband, Gordon (Tom McCarthy). Having met conspiracy radio talk show host Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) on the vacation — as well as Adrian, who has read his book — Jackson starts to believe that the Earth is doomed, a fact that is told to him by the Russian twins.

Jackson gets to his family with no time to spare as all of California falls to an earthquake as he races to the airport and Gordon gets the plane off the ground as the runway cracks and falls. Trying to get Charlie to find out where the arks are, he decides to stay and watch Yellowstone’s supervolcano, which kills him.

Nearly all of the rest of the world has died other than Carl, Adrian, First Daughter Laura (Thadiwe Newton), the Russians and Jackson and family, who all make it to the Himalayans and only Yuri and his boys have tickets, stranding Tamara, who is taken in by Jackson and family, who meet Nima, and all of their families try to break into one of the arks.

Nearly everyone after everyone died dies — I have a major problem with Tamara dying as she’s treated as an afterthought throughout the whole movie and her sacrifice is treated as nothing, with no one sad — and Jackson and his ex-wife reconcile and Adrian and Laura get together as the arks make it safely away from the flood.

There’s an alternate ending where Adrian’s father Harry (Blu Mankuma) and his jazz singer partner Tony Delgado (George Segal) survive. It’s pretty much a return to 70s disaster movies and I like that.

How it was marketed was controversial. There was a website for the Institute for Human Continuity, along with Jackson’s  book Farewell Atlantis and radio broadcasts from Charlie Frost, as well as his site This Is the End. Visitors could also register to get a ticket on the arks. NASA’s David Morrison was upset by this, as he got a thousand or more letters from worried people thinking the site was real. He said, “I’ve even had cases of teenagers writing to me saying they are contemplating suicide because they don’t want to see the world end. I think when you lie on the internet and scare children to make a buck, that is ethically wrong.”

It also had a new commercial placement that had never been done before. Called a roadblock campaign, it showed the thrilling two-minute escape from the earthquake scene — it’s the best part of the movie — on 450 American commercial television networks, local English-language and Spanish-language stations and 89 cable outlets at some point between 10:50 and 11:00 P.M. 90% of all households watching ad-supported TV — 110 million viewers — saw the commercial.

The whole idea of 2012 being the end of the world is supposed to have come from the Mayan calendar. But nope. They found a series of astronomical alignments that would happen in 2012, which only happened every 640,000 years, as the sun would line up with the center of the Milky Way on the day it would be lowest on the horizon. Versions of this alignment happen every December, to be honest. And while the Mayan Calendar ended in 2012, they didn’t see it as the end of the world.

Emmerich claimed, “I said to myself that I’ll do one more disaster movie, but it has to end all disaster movies. So I packed everything in.” Then he made Independence Day: Resurgence and Moonfall.