Let me tell you why 2012 was a terrible movie

[Amake]

It took a while to figure out, in between the useless spectacle of landmarks being destroyed dramatically, the flawed storytelling of trying to show an intimate story of one man trying to save his family and a large, sweeping portrait of a great number of characters that have nothing to do with each other both at the same time (did we really need to see ten minutes of president Murtaugh just so he could die bravely?), the bad science (supercharged neutrinos, what?) and the ham-handed attempts to deal with philosophical questions like should people get to know that the world is ending (no), what of our work do we need to preserve (really just the Mona Lisa) and who do you save, if you can only save a few (let's go with 40 000 of the most corrupt, selfish, cut-throat mercenary rich fuckers on the planet because obviously they'd be angry if we just took their money and left them to die).

No, there's something bigger than that, buried under the bullshit. It's the fact that the plot makes no sense; that the plan to save humanity should have failed and then humanity and the planet Earth are saved anyway for no Goddamn reason.

Look, we're told the bullshit neutrinos are superheating the planet's core. That Earth will become uninhabitable. The only thing to do is get away; take a core population, build a generational spaceship, set a course for Alpha Centauri and hope there's a planet to settle there somewhere. And for the first 3/4 of the movie this is the plan. When the tectonic plates start sliding around the Earth's crust like butter in a hot pan, mankind's last hope gets in the spaceships.

Except then the spaceships don't do anything. They're suddenly boats, that just happen to be able to float away on the monster tides.

And then the end of the world just stops. For no reason. This is the part that's bad; the part that's so terrible there's no point in discussing anything that happens after it. And no point in anything that happened before either, come to think of it.

I don't know if it was supposed to be a twist ending, if someone thought it would be too depressing to have the planet be destroyed in the movie that is about the planet being destroyed, or if the movie was just designed by committee to such a degree that they left this hole in it big enough to float an ark through. None of those options are acceptable. There's just no possible way for the Earth to be destroyed and then suddenly stop being destroyed. The movie doesn't even try to explain it a little bit; it just smiles sheepishly and asks us to forgive it. Let's not.

Now this thread is about stories that dropped the ball and how they would have been better.

2012 would have been better if the arks left for space, obviously. The smoking wreckage of the Earth left behind, the people of the three city-ships now have to struggle to get along as they come to realize none of them can get away from each other for the next several thousand years. Maybe one ship is wiped out in massive riots. The other two can then dock with it and get some extra space.

Fifteen thousand years later they find an inhabitable planet, and while they try to decide if they have any right to take this world or if they should keep flying, the credits roll.