'2012': Expect a good run

Run! Run! RUN! Go! Go! GO! Don't look back! NOW! Have finer words been spoken in the history of the motion picture? Today, let us salute the long, improbable, unappreciated history of outrunning stuff in film.

Film history is marked with technical innovation and aesthetic breakthroughs -- the birth of sound, the hand-held camera shot, the Technicolor process. But why spend time swooning over middling innovations such as those when Roland Emmerich has a new disaster movie coming out?

"2012" opens Friday and will feature, as most of his films have, virtuosic scenes of characters outrunning all sorts of stupid stuff. Indeed, Emmerich, the German-born auteur who made "The Day After Tomorrow," "Independence Day" and a bunch of other entertaining junk tailor-made for 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, has raised the device to an art.

And so, here is a brief history of outrunning stuff in Emmerich movies.

10,000 B.C. (2008)

Man outruns beast. (Beast outruns man.)

Details: A hunter-gatherer epic featuring proto-European man outrunning saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. Most remarkable are the sequences in which a woolly mammoth stays a step ahead of its predators -- a clever twist on the device?

Similar achievements: The children outrunning raptors in "Jurassic Park," the fishermen outswimming the shark in "Jaws."

Actual chance of success: If only man had created the wheel 6,500 years earlier.

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

Man outruns fireball, shock waves.

Details: Where to begin? Otherworldly invaders lay waste to mankind. Two fireball sequences stand out, however: Vivica A. Fox's and Will Smith's golden retriever outleaps a fireball milliseconds before it eviscerates a tunnel choked with cars. And Air Force One (carrying President Bill Pullman) manages to stay inches from the apocalyptic fireball that engulfs the Beltway.

Similar achievements: Countless. See any "Die Hard" film. In "Mission: Impossible," Tom Cruise not only avoids the explosion that downs a helicopter, but it blows him toward a train and safety. In "Predator," Arnold Schwarzenegger outruns the effects of a nuclear blast, although he does have a few seconds' head start.

Actual chance of success: Improbable.

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004)

Man outruns weather.

Details: Possibly the finest achievement in outrunning-stuff-centric motion pictures. Not only does Jake Gyllenhaal outrun a flood that engulfs Manhattan, but soon after he outruns a dangerous cold front that sweeps across the submerged island. (Dennis Quaid is forced to trudge from Washington, D.C., to New York City during the onset of an Ice Age.)

Similar achievements: Mark Wahlberg outruns wind in "The Happening"; Wesley Snipes outruns sunlight in "Blade II."

Actual chance of success: Perhaps in a plane or driving fast, but on foot, unlikely.

2012 (2009)

Man outruns apocalypse?

Details: Judging from the trailer and extended scenes released online, the showstopper is an extended sequence in which John Cusack, with his family, out-drives, then out-flies, not only an earthquake but the entire collapse of the West Coast.

Similar achievements: Arguably without precedent -- although perhaps the moment in "Deep Impact" when Elijah Wood, on his dirt bike, and towing Leelee Sobieski, outruns a tidal wave that swamps the entire East Coast.

Actual chance of success: If Cusack outruns the end of the world, it's Emmerich's "Citizen Kane" -- which, incidentally, did not feature a character outrunning a fireball, although it should have.