The End of the World and Everyone Knows It
I’ve always had a hankering for apocalyptic fiction. It probably goes back to the original Planet of the Apes being one of the first big-screen movies I ever experienced, though I was too young to appreciate or remember more than a flash or two — “Daddy, why is is that monkey riding a horse?”. I was probably asleep by the time Heston knelt in the sand in front of the Statue of Liberty. Does that still count as a spoiler? Nevertheless, it seems to have left an impression.
Recently, there’s been a boomlet of what I call full-stop apocalyptic movies. What I’m talking about is the sort of movie where everyone, and I do mean everyone, dies at the end thanks to some earth-ending cataclysmic event. No escaping to another world on a spaceship ala When Worlds Collide (or getting picked up by a Vogon construction fleet). Nope, the curtain comes down on everything and everyone in one dreadful, final coda.
You have to be in the right sort of mood to enjoy this kind of thing. I find a largish whiskey helps. While it sounds bleak, as an author or dramatist, the idea isn’t without merit. We’re all going to be face-to-face with death at some point. In this sort of story, all your characters are going to be meeting death at about the same time. The interest comes in seeing how each recognizes, struggles against, and eventually experiences their final moments, singly or together.
Lirbriomancer
In a charming case of movie irony, the new Total Recall has already been mostly forgotten, even though it only came out on Friday. The Dark Knight Rises, in its third week, handily crushed the Len Wiseman-directed remake. I’m writing this on Tuesday, and it already feels as if the movie was never even released: it was a dream implant that never took, and the original memory of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven-Arnold Schwarzenegger Summer blockbuster has already taken back all the cerebral space. Nonetheless, I’ll still perform this brain autopsy on Total Recall ’12 to see why no one bothered to show up except for people writing reviews.
“But my memories of that great tragedy are not all sad. There was high adventure, there was noble fighting; and in the end there was — but perhaps you would like to hear about it.”
Back on Mars already?
With directing great superheroes comes great responsibility. I wish director Marc Webb knew this. Or perhaps directing superheroics on screen isn’t something the man is capable of.
