MANILA, Philippines ? What is it about us viewers that make us pay good money to watch a film about the imminent end of the world that pretty much scares us to kingdom come?

The confounded thought hit us as we were watching Roland Emmerich?s latest apocalyptic scenario, ?2012,? yelping with the other people in the movie theater as the destruction of the planet we call home is savagely detailed for our ?entertainment.?

This is fun at the movies? No, it?s excruciating to watch and horrendous to behold ? but, behold it, we do, transfixed by the fictive prospect of our own mass perdition.

Prospects

Why are we such patsies for communal punishment? As if our real travails weren?t daunting enough, why do we allow masters of digitized destruction to terrify us with dire prospects of damnation that may never come to pass?

The Greeks had a word for it: Catharsis, defined as the release of pent-up emotions through a virtual experience like watching an exciting production.

You can also call it a safe ?rehearsal? for any real disaster or other negative experience that life may have in store for us. Since it isn?t real, we can ?practice? how we would react if it actually did come true ? and that safety value makes it OK for us to volubly express the emotions resulting from the imagined tragedy.

This, in fact, is why many of us bother to watch productions about disasters in the first place. In the safe facsimiles of life that they provide, they summon up emotions and insights we need to get a hold of our real lives, and to master them.

What makes ?2012? an even more empathetically scary experience is the detailed verisimilitude that the film medium?s state-of-the-art digitizing prowess provides.

It enables its makers to come up with staggeringly convincing images of mass destruction that require viewers to remind themselves that they?re ?just? watching a fiction film, so they really don?t need to run out of the theater and rush home to take their kids to the highest peak in sight!

Unfortunately, the film?s fierce reliance on its visual wizardry has led it to give insufficient attention to its empathetic storytelling, beyond its compelling images of death and destruction on a global scale.

Cliché attempts

An effort is made to bring the destruction down to empathetically human terms, but they are pretty much formula, cliché attempts that come off as half-hearted when compared to the production?s prodigiously lush and lavish visualizations.

?2012? topbills stars like John Cusack and Amanda Peet but, truth to tell, they are thoroughly upstaged by the computerized mayhem happening around them.

So, what?s a viewer to do? Focus on the production?s digitized thrills and chills, and leave well enough alone. That may not be everything, but it?ll have to do. And, for some viewers, it could be more than enough, less than fully cathartic though the experience may be.