Roland Emmerich is a man who seeks closure. Big time.

The director who blew up the White House in “Independence Day’’ - and unleashed a new Ice Age in “The Day After Tomorrow’’ - goes for the gold, apocalypse-wise, in “2012.’’ It opens Friday.

More than just a disaster movie, “2012’’ is an uber-disaster movie. It offers up nothing less than the end of the world, as predicted by the Mayan calendar (2012 is a year, not a truncated ZIP code). The many subsidiary disasters are endured onscreen by John Cusack, Amanda Peet, and the rest of humankind.

Disaster movies have long been a Hollywood cottage industry. A dark and rather forbidding room in that cottage has belonged to disaster movies that deal with the end of the world. “2012’’ may or may not be the end-of-the-world disaster movie to end all end-of-the-world disaster movies. It’s certainly not the first.

Murphy’s Law states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. That formulation might seem to imply there are a lot of ways for the world to end. Apparently, not at the movies.

Ending the world filmically has tended to fall into four basic categories:

1. EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTERVENTION

A comet does the damage, or threatens to, in both “Deep Impact’’ (1998) and “Night of the Comet’’ (1984). Another planet wipes out Earth in “When Worlds Collide’’ (1951), directed by the great cinematographer Rudolph Maté. Certainly, no end-of-the-world movie has had a better crash-bang title.

Aliens (not the Lou Dobbs kind) are a serious threat, too. Earthlings are usually able to foil them - either comically, as in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’’ (2005), or violently, as in the two versions of “War of the Worlds’’ (1953, 2005). The destruction wrought in the latter is enormous, though. The result may not quite be the end of the world but it’s certainly the end of the world as its inhabitants formerly knew it. As Nikita Khrushchev once said of what the aftermath of nuclear war would be like, “The living will envy the dead.’’

2. BLAME IT ON THE BOMB

This genre flourished during the Cold War. It was a cinematic two-fer: an opportunity for big-time spectacle combined with high-liberal seriousness. Actually, it was a three-fer. Special-effects budgets could be kept low, since all a director needed to indicate worldwide annihilation was stock footage of a mushroom cloud. Even Roger Corman, no fool he, got in on the act, in “Day the World Ended’’ (1955).