There’s a reason disaster movies continue to be so popular.

It’s a phenomenon that started in the 70s with flicks like “Airport” and “The Towering Inferno,” motion pictures packed with stars and explosions (and usually very, very implausible plotlines). Producers loved them because the moneymaking potential was so great, stars loved them because they were easy to act in, writers loved them because, well, once you had the premise they wrote themselves, and we loved them because we (Americans, I mean) simply love to watch crap get destroyed.

We are a nation that celebrates its independence with heavy explosives, and a large percentage of us spend our Sunday afternoons during a certain part of the year watching cars zip around a track at 200 miles per hour hoping and praying that one of them will hit the wall and send five more careening into oblivion. It’s only natural that it would be fun for us to sit in a movie theater and watching a skyscraper fall into another skyscraper like a great glass domino.

Social commentary aside, I am by no means complaining about the American appetite for destruction, because it means at the very least that every few years a talented filmmaker can round up a few awesome actors and spend hundreds of millions of dollars imagining what the whole of Yellowstone National Park would look like as a volcano.

Such is the appeal of “2012,” the latest epic from Roland Emmerich (who destroyed the world twice already in “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow”). Based on the ages old speculation that the end of the world will come when the ancient Mayan calendar ends in the titular year, the film is little more than a series of remarkable CGI destruction sequences filled in with movie stars running, screaming and cracking the occasional joke, and honestly, that’s just fine with me.

“But wait, Matt,” you’re saying right now. “You hate bombastic Hollywood money wasters. You beat up on Michael Bay just a few months ago for all the cash he wasted on ‘Transformers.’”

Yes, I beat up on Michael Bay (and I’ll likely keep beating up on Michael Bay), but there is a difference between a director whose films include bombshell actresses tarted-up like beer commercial babes and racist robots calling himself an artist and a director who knows he’s just in it for the fun. I’m all for exploitation cinema, as long as A: it’s well made and B: we all acknowledge that we’re here to just have some popcorn and a laugh or two. Got it? Good, moving on.

The flick begins in present day, when a scientist in India discovers that solar eruptions on the sun are suddenly and inexplicably transferring microwave energy to the earth, in effect cooking our core like the pepperoni pizza filling of a Hot Pocket. Seeing the danger, he notifies U.S. geologist Dr. Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who notifies his boss Carl Aneheuser (Oliver Platt) who makes the decision to notify the president (Danny Glover). Seeing that the end of the world is imminent, the president decides to bring it up at the next G8 summit. Within a year, world leaders are assembling and devising a secret plan to herd up the world’s greatest treasures (the Mona Lisa, that sort of thing) and the world’s richest people (someone has to pay for it, of course) on “arks” that will protect a small fraction of the human race until a civilization can be re-established.

Cut to 2012. Earthquakes start to hit, the world starts falling apart, and Emmerich takes us on a journey in the lives of a few choice survivors and their struggle to make it to the arks before everything floods over. As the world is crumbling around our ears, we meet a failed novelist (John Cusack), his estranged wife (Amanda Peet), a crazy AM radio host (Woody Harrelson), a Russian billionaire (Zlatko Buric) and the president’s art-loving daughter (Thandie Newton), all of whom are slowly becoming aware that the world is really ending, they can’t stop it, and all they can do is run until the earth swallows them up.

The best thing about the film is that Emmerich never takes himself too seriously. I can imagine him like a gleeful child seated in the world’s most expensive sandbox, building from the ground up massive scenes of destruction, showing us everything from the collapse of the Vatican (and the crushing of the Pope, no less) to a massive cargo plane clipping the top of Vegas’ Bellagio Casino as it collapses. Even amidst all the destruction, the jokes keeping coming, reminding you (if you didn’t realize it already) that the whole thing is completely implausible, and we’re all just here to have a little fun.

So, to sum up: big, wonderfully done special effects, a great cast, a lot of jokes, and way too much corny preaching about the best in humanity equals the most fun you’ll have at the movies this fall (and yes, that includes “New Moon,” so suck on that, you Twilight freaks). And even if you’re not into all that, you get to watch California sink into the Pacific, and who hasn’t dreamed about that once or twice?

Matt’s Call: It’s all entirely overwrought, but you have way too much fun to care. Watch it with a sense of humor, and you’re in for a treat.