Like pieces of rubble strewn about from an earthquake of epic proportions, reviews on the end-of-time blockbuster movie "2012" -- which opens this weekend -- are all over the place.
Some, like Dan Kois of the Washington Post and Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, gave gushing reviews.
The Post's review betrays a tinge of sheepishness on the part of the author, who chides the director Roland Emmerich for failing to correct long-held misnomers about the Mayan calendar, and refers to its depiction of solar flares as "nonesense."
Nonetheless, Kois admits that he enjoyed the movie, which he describes as "enormously satisfying, astonishingly accomplished, reprehensible-yet-irresistible."
On the other end of the spectrum was Peter Travers of Rolling Stone.
"We probably are nearing the end of the movie world when it's easy to predict that the biggest turd in the bowl will rise to the top of the box office," he groaned. "Equally depressing is the pass some critics are giving to this 158 minute (you heard me!) slog through every end-of-days cliché in the Hollywood playbook."
All told, the movie has scored a 51 out of 100 on Metacritic, a Web site
that compiles all the major reviews of every movie and uses them to create a composite score. That represents a grade of about a C-minus.
Perhaps predictably, the score given by the reviews of common folk amounted to a slightly more forgiving 6.3 out of 10.
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