There’s more human suffering on display in Roland Emmerich’s 2012 than any other film I’ve seen. Emmerich raises the stakes of his own game, creating a level of destruction that outdoes anything seen in Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow. Where he succeeds most brilliantly is in forming a perfectly satisfying piece of coherent bubble gum B-movie, where Michael Bay, given a comparable amount of funding, will produce utter chaos.

The only well-rounded character in 2012 is the calamity itself: unprecedentedly huge solar flares are causing the core of the earth to heat up and weaken the crust of the earth. This is making the tectonic plates of the earth shift around, causing earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes and the bisection of the occasional grocery store. Emmerich takes about a half an hour to warm up the audience for impending doom, which makes 2012 incredibly lengthy when it doesn’t need to be. He could lop off the entire front portion of the film and begin with a mysterious bang, letting us put the pieces together as we go along, and it would have functioned just as well.

As a result, we get weird subplots — the replacement of famous artwork in the Louvre and Buddhist monks and simple nonsense. That’s okay, though, because this breathing room lets us hang out with characters, none of whom are totally fleshed out, but also none that are really unlikeable. John Cusack, as a failed everyman writer, is as likable as he’s been in every role in his career.

Blessed with a slightly better script, he would really hold 2012 together; as it stands, it’s definitely an ensemble piece. We get fine turns from Oliver Platt, Woody Harrelson and Chitwel Ejiofor, but they’re the standard characters we’ve become familiar with since Emmerich showed them off in Independence Day. His actors are chess pieces in showcase scenes, which is totally fine. The movie knows what it wants to be, satisfies that purpose, and nothing more.

It’s an average film, highly entertaining in the theater and ultimately disposable on the way out. However, the “rollercoaster ride” cliche totally applies to 2012, and seems to wear it with pride. The thing is, I can’t see Emmerich going anywhere after this film; he’s going to have to try his hand at a different game, because where do you go after destroying the world?

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

In one corner, weighing in at over 900 pounds of freshly squeezed shame, the recently resigned President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon! And, in the other corner, weighing in at just 3 kilos of experience, the British talk-show host and laughingstock of the American media empire, David Frost! That’s how Peter Morgan, the British screenwriter made famous by The Queen and The Last King of Scotland, sets up his story about America’s most infamous ex-President.

It doesn’t feel like the story will be big enough to carry 122 minutes of screen time at first. Nixon resigns under the weight of the Watergate avalanche and withdraws to a California estate. David Frost, known then only as the host of several British talk shows, finds himself alongside the American media giants seeking an exit interview with the newly pardoned President.

After discussing his options with his new agent, played with comedic flair by Toby Jones, Nixon chooses Frost, who is both the highest bidder and the most inexperienced-seeming interviewer of the group. Frost struggles to fund the high-priced interviews while also preparing for them, ultimately conducting them on his own dime. It sounds like the making of an hour-long documentary at most, not a two-hour feature length production.

Something about the characters would have to carry the space. Frank Langella turns in an outstanding performance as the embattled Nixon. Rather than relying on cheap overused soundbites like “I am not a crook” — a line that thankfully never appeared in the script — Langella becomes Nixon, from his deep, gravelly voice to his nervous mannerisms and cocky swagger.

Michael Sheen (no relation to those Sheens) is brilliant as David Frost, a character that most of us don’t know and couldn’t appreciate a great impersonation of if we did. The hard work here was to make us care about the character at all, and Sheen’s portrayal is a complex mixture of silly and sad, moving toward an uncertain victory that everyone can cheer for over a dark villain that everyone roots against.

But Nixon isn’t all villain. In several conversations with Frost and with family members, and even in a brief exchange between Nixon and a bystander’s dog, Tricky Dick comes across as a real human with real emotions. Those who aren’t familiar with the intensity of the Watergate scandal and its aftermath might even leave the theater with a very sympathetic understanding of a man who made “mistakes of the heart, but not of the mind.”

This sympathetic yet sleazy Nixon, along with Frost, take up most of the screen time as the title suggests. But a small cast requires the right kind of support; Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, Matthew MacFadyen, and Kevin Bacon do an excellent job of supplementing the Frost/Nixon duo without confusing the story.

To be fair, it didn’t do everything perfectly. A drunken, midnight call from Nixon to Frost is used to explain in excruciating detail just exactly what their adversarial interview represents. Morgan’s Britishness overtakes the American story here, and the whole struggle is boiled down to a class-versus-class battle more typical of English tales.

After their lengthy midnight conversation, Frost is inexplicably motivated to work harder than ever before to prepare for their final session the next day. These all-night preparations are assembled by way of, as you may have guessed, the studying montage. In a story with so much space to work with, it’s hard to forgive the use of such a tired device.

In spite of its small flaws, Frost/Nixon comes out remarkably well. There’s a small cast of excellent characters. There’s a love interest who doesn’t artificially overwhelm the story. There’s a historical representation of a real, simple story that isn’t dry or dull. And there are other stories beneath it, about an old man living with big mistakes and bigger consequences, and about a young man struggling to be taken seriously.

If you love history, or just a good story, you’ll adore Frost/Nixon.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆