To talk about Roland Emmerich’s “2012” in terms of plot, or performances, or even guiding ideas is probably a waste of time. Anyone who is easily frustrated by plot holes, unsound physics and wooden, cheesy performances has probably long since learned to avoid Emmerich’s work. More importantly, in the cinematic universe Emmerich has created for himself, things like story and performance are profoundly beside the point.

Emmerich is, after all, the director who brought us “Independence Day” and the scientifically ludicrous “Day After Tomorrow.” This time he offers his take on the stupid but highly zeitgeisty idea that the world is slated to end on the winter solstice in 2012, so you might expect that the movie is in some way about all of the juicy philosophical quandaries that might be raised by knowing the end is imminent.

It isn’t. Mr. Emmerich’s films are really only about making beautiful pictures of impossible things, and pummeling the audience to into submission with them. These images come at you so relentlessly that it’s easy to forget how little sense it’s all making. A few examples:

• Cracks in the earth are unlikely to take enough personal interest to chase you.
• The San Andreas fault does not exist to demonstrate the lack of intimacy between lovers, and it will likely not wait for the correct moment in their conversation to split a grocery store in half, trapping them on opposite sides of its maw.
• Noah’s Ark made no sense before the common era and it makes even less sense now.

There is impressive technique on display here, but the technique is not made to serve any real ideas. Sure, you should love your family, and you shouldn’t be a jerk – but it’s hard to imagine you need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get grade-school sentiments like that across.

All of that complaining aside, I am a child of the 70’s and I have a deep and abiding love for implausible disaster movies. It’s in my DNA – I make no apologies. If you can manage to get past the poor plotting, lazy performances and stupid dialogue, “2012” delivers the spectacle. Almost three hours’ worth. Everything blows up, or drowns or catches fire. Everything, everywhere. Familiar monuments are destroyed with alarming frequency. The Himalayas are overtopped by a tsunami. Cities fall into the sea. Yellowstone becomes a volcano so powerful that its eruption rains ash on DC in a matter of hours.

On the whole, it’s a pompous, overlong B-minus movie with real stars and a functionally limitless effects budget. Taken on its own limited terms, it’s a moderate success. You probably already know if you’re the kind of person susceptible to its charms. If you like the rest of the Emmerich canon, this is exactly like those, only incalculably moreso.

Also, it will make a metric ass-ton of money. Nothing takes the mind off the bad things happening in your real life like worse things happening to imaginary strangers.