It is a manifestation of absurd fascination of Westerners towards the "End Days". The Mayan Calendar does not predict the end of the world in 2012. The particular director has a fascination over such doomsday scenario movies - all "crapily" made moreover.
The Indian audience will lap hype from the West with great enthusiasm. I think our Vittalacharya had good special effects even in those days and the story line was entertaining :-))))))
Mother sentiment SJ surya / TR mattum thaan panuvangala ;-) Mummy and Aatha are the same... works at the BO.
The best way to figure out what would happen in 2012 is to research what happened in the previous cycle... that our history gurus here will be able to help.
5112 years before 2012 - any takers or is Dwapara yuga end at 5112 BC ? somethings r so darn confusing.
EOD scene is easy to sell, but tricky to sustain.
I particularly liked the 'intelligent' way the director works in 2012, a single engine plane ministered by a pilot with just 2 hrs of flight classes takes out of a super volcano ($*##@!%) ... dude that is one big bright yellow sun flower on the ear.. hell with the turbulence, we dont get those in movies...
And then..we get a Garland of sunflowers when the same pilot dude flies a turbo jet :) Oh wow... cool!
In a lighter tone...I would have enjoyed the movie if our Kuruvi Vijay acted instead of Cusack. At'least 2012 would have been a complete comedy movie.
Disasters are a human morbid fascination not just western fascination. Hollywood has made capital out of this fascination since budgets are not a constraint for them. Actually some older disaster movies are pretty decent viewing, even a recent one 'The Mist' had an interesting ending, although body of the movie was pretty unwatchable. Some really nice older disaster movies are The Birds, Earthquake, Towering Inferno, Poseidion Adventure etc, they are still very watchable.
As far as RAmanarayanan and Vittalacharya go they are not absurd fascinations they are just absurd period. Older nicer movies on the folk tales again like Patala Bhairavi is a very well made one. More folk/legend based ones like Uthama Puthiran, Maragatham and so on are very watchable even today.