From the trailers and sneak peeks we have seen so far, it sure does look like everything goes in 2012. Buildings collapse, tidal waves wash over the mountains, the earth cracks open, and fire rains down from the skies. The most famous monuments around the world are spectacularly destroyed, and religious icons in particular seem to take it on the chin.
Not a fan of organized religion, director Roland Emmerich rips apart sacred sites with gleeful abandon. The Vatican gets it, from the crack running right down the center of the celling of the Sistine chapel to St. Peter's Basilica rolling over and crushing worshipers. The iconic statue Christ the Reedemer in Rio de Janeiro crumbles, and a Buddhist temple high in the mountains is reclaimed by the sea. He stops short at Islamic monuments, though.
Originally, he confesses, he wanted to to destroy one of Islam's holiest sites as well: the Kaaba, a cube-shaped building in Mecca that is the focus of of the Islamic pilgrimage called the Hajj. But, he explains to Sci-Fi Wire, cooler heads ultimately prevailed:
Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit. But my co-writer Harald said, "I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie." And he was right. ... We have to all ... in the Western world ... think about this. You can actually ... let ... Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.