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In “2012,” from Roland Emmerich, an aircraft carrier hangs 10 on a Washington tidal wave.

ON Nov. 13, when his latest tale of the apocalypse, “2012,” arrives in theaters, the filmmaker Roland Emmerich will have waged more assaults on this planet than he can remember. He’s frozen it, drowned it and sicced aliens and Godzilla on it. The earth is his Jason Voorhees from “Friday the 13th,” and it just keeps coming back.

Well, not after the pulverizing the earth takes in “2012.” “This is my last, quote-unquote, action-disaster movie,” Mr. Emmerich, the 53-year-old German director behind spectacles like “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” said in a telephone interview from his home in London. “I know I can’t destroy the world again. That would be kind of a joke.”

In this latest calamity, a monster solar flare shoots invisible neutrinos into the earth’s core, cooking it like a Hot Pocket. The seas rise. Tectonic plates shuffle. Volcanoes erupt. And every edifice and geographic landmark in their paths (save for a few sacred sites) is submerged, scorched or altogether shredded. Somehow the concepts of plot and character development — amid all the mayhem, John Cusack plays a failed novelist turned limo driver for a Russian oligarch — cling to dear life.

“You know what you’re getting when Roland Emmerich calls,” said Amanda Peet, who plays the ex-wife of Jackson (Mr. Cusack) as well as his partner in peril. “You’re not going to be like, ‘Can we go into my childhood in this?’ ”

“Roland,” she added, “knows exactly how much he wants it to be grounded in reality and how much he wants it to be a ride and a massive catharsis.”

Alien invaders, tsunamis and asteroids have crashed into Mr. Emmerich’s oeuvre since he first blew up the White House in 1996 with a blue death ray, in “Independence Day.” (Even the Discovery Channel followed suit with its own doomsday-theme reality series called “The Colony.”) So how exactly did he make “2012,” which he calls “the mother of all disaster movies”?

In “2012” Mr. Emmerich pits the accelerating entropy of the planet against a worldwide government conspiracy — Noah’s Ark meets “The X-Files.” And he tries to top his previous disaster movies by ratcheting up the scale of destruction in the film’s 157 minutes. (This time he lets the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, sitting in Chesapeake Bay, wipe out the White House.) He also slips in even more ridiculous jokes right before tragedy strikes. Gordon (Tom McCarthy) tells his love interest, Kate (Ms. Peet), “I feel like something is pulling us apart.” Then a gaping fissure opens between them in the aisle of the supermarket where they’re standing; it’s the beginning of an earthquake that eventually sends California sliding into the Pacific.

“It’s just a counterbalance to the suspense,” Mr. Emmerich said.

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