Why are movies killing our planet?
By Lisa Kennedy
Denver Post Film CriticPosted: 04/12/2009 12:30:00 AM MDT
In the graphic-novel adaptation "Watchmen," the Doomsday Clock ticks forward. Nuclear conflagration is minutes away as a rough collection of masked avengers works out a complicated, romantic soap opera. The end of the world as we poor, undeserving humans know it seems like an aside for them. And for filmmakers. The world also comes to an end in "Knowing." The Nicolas Cage thriller opened at No. 1 at the box office last month. This vexed orb is slated for demolition again in "Terminator Salvation" and, again in "2012" — two surefire summer-season smashes. Moviemakers continue to hone their talent for taking down landmarks and wiping out populations. Look at the Chrysler Building's spire plummet toward the street: Cool! Watch a tidal wave take down a monastery in the Himalayas: Awesome! We've seen the crash before. Yet the tools make the images of bringing down an entire plane or wiping out a city block that much more dismaying. With ever-more-impressive special effects and computer-generated images, studio pictures already deft at destruction are getting even better at delivering mayhem to the multiplex throng — be it horror, disaster or worse.
Only too often, the worst plays out like a blip in the screenplay. Cataclysm is a plot point, not the end point.
But as their bag of tricks gets heftier, shouldn't filmmakers' ethical burden grow as well? Does having the shock-and-awe tools for depicting mass destruction for mass distraction mean that we should use them?
Fear changes its maskEven films pitched to the kids aren't safe. A lavish action sequence in the enjoyable 3-D spectacle "Monsters vs. Aliens" gleefully wrecks the Golden Gate Bridge. As beloved as it is by critics, the opening scenes in "WALL-E" of an uninhabitable metropolis suggest filmmakers don't think hard enough about the impact visions of apocalyptic or post-cataclysmic landscapes might have on developing imaginations. Too often, they're feeding the pleasures of their own inner kid or teen.
Denizens of the overcourted demographic of young males have a very different relationship to the catastrophic than that of baby boomers. These kids didn't grow up duck-and- covering in their school hallways. Which doesn't mean that they don't have anxieties — just not the same ones. Stored in their own image- bank of fears: scenes from school shootings, threats of dirty bombs and acts of hideous but contained terror.
We are all only beginning to grapple with how images from 9/11, often described as "like a movie," will resonate on the big screen.
More mayhem is headed toward the multiplex.
"Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins" opens May 21. One of the grander franchises, this one has always created space-time physics conundrums of whether it is depicting an avoidable end or a horrible beginning.
Fall will see Roland Emmerich's latest epic disaster, "2012," about the end of times as prophesied in the Mayan calendar, not be be confused with the End Times prophesied in the "Left Behind" books and films.
At least, one could argue that the evangelical-Kirk Cameron franchise has a higher, if troubling, purpose. By comparison, the secular forays into the apocalypse — while often spectacular — seem spectacularly cynical.
What was once cathartic seems exploitative. Which leaves us unsettled and wondering: Has the end of the world lost its sting?
And how could that possibly be a good thing?
High anxietiesIt's no surprise that the first era of disaster movies was ushered in with the Cold War and nuclear arms race. The list of films, B and otherwise, famously includes the movie adaptation of H.G. Wells' sci-fi novel "The War of the Worlds" (1953); "It Came From Outer Space" (1953); "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" (1956); and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956).
Stanley Kramer's 1959 post- nuclear-war film, "On the Beach," was a different sort of outing. It starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire as a collection of varied personalities who find themselves in Australia when they learn the unthinkable has occurred in the Northern Hemisphere. And now the nuclear plume is floating southward. It took seriously (some argued too melodramatically) the death of humankind. Anthony Perkins played a young Australian naval officer who had to instruct his resistant wife on how to kill their infant daughter and then herself when the lethal cloud came.
In the '70s, the studio disaster flick was a star-studded yet oddly intimate affair. If the era's low-budget horror films were mining the miseries of the Vietnam War in a displaced fashion, the disaster genre suggested a middle class under duress. Remember Helen Hayes on the endangered jet in "Airport"? Or Shelley Winters in "The Poseidon Adventure"? Paul Newman in a high-rise ablaze in "The Towering Inferno"? Charlton Heston, making the right decision at the end of "Earthquake" to perish with estranged wife Ava Gardner over living on with his mistress? (A no-brainer, we think.)
Having seen these films when I was young, I recognize the fears they tweaked. Anxieties I didn't even know I had: elevators ("Towering Inferno"), parking structures, overpasses and elevators ("Earthquake," "in Sensurround!"), ship-rolling swells and turtlenecks with blazers ("The Poseidon Adventure").
Tearing it all upIt wasn't that these movies were good. They weren't. But their cynicism was quaint and contained. It had yet to go global.
In a trailer for "2012," a Tibetan Buddhist monk desperately climbs a mountain to sound a gong in a fortress monastery.
"How would the governments of our planet prepare six billion for the end of the world?" ask the blocks of text. The monk's face says it all. But just in case, the text provides an answer:
"They wouldn't."
Perhaps you recognize the handiwork. Director Roland Emmerich has made some of the best-known rip-annihilate-blow-stuff-up scenarios onscreen, starting with "Independence Day," stomping onward to "Godzilla." In 2004, he gave moviegoers "The Day After Tomorrow," the ridiculous and successful action drama about climate change.
Truce with end timesOf course, pleas for the sanctity of the imagination often sound humorless or naive. Popular culture often takes on our worries with overblown gestures.
But every now and again, a correction is called for. Disaster flicks, like slasher films, have started to sell FX realism as its own reason to be. Lessons once imparted (however cheesily) about what disaster means seem boiled down to an MBA seminar.
Filmmakers seem set on a course in which ever-scarier versions of demise are fine, as long as the box office confirms their success.
Just because Emmerich is addicted to doomsday rushes doesn't mean we have to follow him over that cliff, suggests Boulder-based filmmaker Patty Greer.
Her documentary, "2012: We're Already in It," engages a variety of spiritually inclined folk on the meaning of 2012. In February, it won the the award for Best Feature Film — UFO or Related at the International UFO Congress Convention in Nevada.
"People people want more than gloom and doom. I do not feature or promote 'end-of-world images' in my work because clearly our thoughts, words and actions create our reality and our dreams," she wrote in an e-mail. "We need to believe in our ability as a race that we can turn things around. . . . The script is still being written."
If so, let's hope that film is also headed to a theater near you.
Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) and Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) find a mushroom cloud
just a backdrop for some superhero smooching in "Watchmen." (Warner Bros. Pictures)
