The Sweltering Continues

Though With Plenty Of Wind

I may take Edna trotties as it hasn't been as paw-punishingly hot today.  There was 10/10s cloud cover earlier which has now faded to scattered clouds and a thin cirrus up on high.  Art!

     An image from the Youtube channel "Vintage Space Art and Graphics" from the 'Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum' which I've had bookmarked for at least 6 months without using it at all.  Here a Gemini capsule sits atop the Redstone launch vehicle, which is a re-purposed ICBM, nothing to worry about at all.

     With that done, let us proceed to the links.

2025

BOOJUM!: If I Were To Say 'Retro-'

2024

BOOJUM!: Vat69nik

2023

BOOJUM!: Indy Five

2022

BOOJUM!: Multimule

2021

BOOJUM!: The Terror Of SHOES!

2020

BOOJUM!: Box Of Andrex For Brian!

2019

BOOJUM!: Bite The Bullet

2018

BOOJUM!: Cool Hand, Luke.

2017

BOOJUM!: Still Banging On And Goofing Off

2016

BOOJUM!: Sic Transit Gloria Monday

2015

BOOJUM!: Seconds Out - Round Two!

2014

BOOJUM!: Short, Sharp And To The Point

2013

BOOJUM!: How is it that -

Once More Into The Wild Black Yonder

I Fancied A Change From The Dour 'The Sky Is Falling' Title Trope

Although I'm still going to dig out corresponding material to make an illustration of the sky falling as we tackle the last 5 entries on 'Top Movies' - a misnomer if ever there was one - list of "20 Best Human Extinction Movies", where I shall hold sway in critical judgement o'er all because once again whose blog is it?  Art!

     That's just to remind you whose blog it is.  Mine.  Comsatangel2002 with my hideous taloned feet, as the AI Art Generator would have it.  More 'prehensile' than 'taloned' but then I'm not a podiatrist.

     ANYWAY let us get on with it.  Is global disaster and the end of the human race imminent?  Is the sky falling?  In the following illos, to all intents and purposes, yes it is.  Art!

     What you see here is the aftermath of Hom.Sap. getting up to industrial mischief on the Moon, where the debris of said object has settled into a new orbit around Earth, seemingly stable enough now, after having caused world-wide devastation and YES! bringing humanity close to extinction.  From the 2002 iteration of 'The Time Machine'.  If you want a closer look at things as they were when this disaster occurred - Art!

     See it as it transpires.  The Moon is breaking up, although it's not clear if this is due to tidal forces because it is approaching Earth far too closely, or if it's being broken up thanks to injudicious mining or excavation or whatever.  Conrad would put little faith in the supporting characters in this scene yelling an explanation to Hartigan, one does not suppose beat cops keep up to speed on astronomical or selenological theory.  Art!

     I don't know if this scene actually occurs in the film 'Moonfall' and am not not not going to watch it to find out.  I've looked at the synopsis and stand back in awe that a film with so stupid a script ever got the green light.  The only explanation is the same one I use for Disney, that they write off films as a tax loss.  Just a sample: the Moon is hollow, an alien megastructure and run by an AI at the core; there's a swarm of evil drones/bots/space weasel vampiroids <delete where applicable> causing all the problems; the whole thing can be solved by two ex-astronauts and a swivel-eyed conspiranoid loonwaffle; they steal a shuttle from a space museum to mount their impossible mission; the Moon sheds it's rocky exterior - more sky falling, folks - to reveal the Dyson sphere underneath.  Art!

     An artist's rendering of the Moon's inner workings.  Art!

     Colour me confused - I think this is the Moon, after shedding it's mantle, scraping along the surface of Earth with neither suffering cataclysmic collapse.  Well, the sky has well and truly fallen in this case, it's just not that big a deal.

     ANYWAY AGAIN let us return to the final 5 films in the list.

"WALL-E": Were you to look only at the surface of Earth, a barren junkyard extending to the horizon in all directions, with only a single robot the sign of any intelligent activity, yes, you might well imagine this is an Extinction Level Event.  Art!

     Wall-E himself, whom Conrad found infinitely more winsome and charming that the ambulatory genitalia called 'ET', whatever that says about me.  Wall-E has been cleaning up his deserted junkworld for 700 years and in that time has developed a personality, especially since there's nobody there to forbid this.  Art!

     HOWEVER - my favouristest word again! - humanity has pulled another 'Interstellar' and rather than becoming extinct, they are now fat and happy gourmands living aboard ships in outer space.  Art!

"THE MATRIX": Kind of half and half.  Yes, there is the city of Zion full of humans, who send out hoverships to scout the deserted landscapes of Earth, but elsewhere the machines hold sway and harvest Hom. Sap. for their battery life.  Art!

     Not so much extinct as being continuously drained.  One wonders what happens to 'batteries' that dwindle in power output or fail completely?  Hmmm perhaps that explains the reddish tinge to the unspeakable glop Neo was swimming in.

"DEEP IMPACT": To say that this is considerably more scientifically accurate than 'Armageddon' is not stating a lot, the bar was set very low to begin with.  This time the antagonist is a 7-mile wide comet, which is entirely feasible, but the lead time is measured in two years from discovery of the impactor.  Art!

     The thing is, this is sufficient lead time to get a probe out there to intercept the comet and, using a gigaton-yield fusion warhead, to impact the surface and change trajectory slightly.  If done up to a year pre-impact, the course alteration will cause the comet to miss.

     But this isn't dramatic enough.  So, we get the comet split into two, one part of which does indeed make a deep impact off the coastline of British America, wiping out much of the eastern shoreline of that nation and South Canada.  PLUS, in an exhibition that the screenwriters knew at least the basics of tsunamis, South America, Africa and Europe.  Art!

     The immediate global death toll is over a billion people, with tens of millions subsequently dead through disease and famine.  So, not quite an ELE, but acceptably close to one to be included in this list. 

"28 DAYS LATER": You can give this one credit for jump-starting the 'fast zombie' trope again, where The Infected (totally not zombies at all wink wink) pursue the uninfected as if mainlining liquid nitromethane and amphetamines.  The films don't clarify how The Infected can spot an uninfected, although the comics openly state it's about smell.  Art!

     Here's one of the opening scenes, with Jim totally ignorant of how much danger he's in by simply strolling around in broad daylight whilst bellowing 'HELLO!" into the silent city streets.  Hands up who jumped when he touches a car and the alarm goes off?  Classic jump scare.  Art!

     

     The extremely unsettling poster.  Now, does it qualify as an Extinction Level Event?  Partially.  There is no doubt that This Sceptred Isle is completely finished, with a mere fraction of a fraction of a per cent of the uninfected population holed up and surviving.  Time is on their side, mind, as The Uninfected are too propelled by rage to bother eating or drinking, and consistently vomit up pints of blood at a time, so they're going to be dead in a couple of weeks at the very most, and probably well before then.  

"DR. STRANGELOVE": Possibly the darkest comedy film ever made, despite what Beetlejuice says about 'The Exorcist'.  Don't let the fact that it was made in black and white dissuade you from watching it, as it's top-notch satire with endlessly quotable lines.  "Gentlemen!  You can't fight in here - this is the War Room!" being one of them.  Art!

     Production design by Ken Adams, the naturalised-Teuton emigré who flew Typhoons in the RAF during the Second Unpleasantness, Peter Sellers in three roles, Sterling Hayden as a paranoid airbase commander, George C. Scott as a gung-ho security advisor and worryingly accurate mock-ups of a B-52's interior.  Plus, the battle for Burpelson Air Force Base is depicted in real cinema verité style and looks very authentic.

     Principal photography began in January 1963, just three months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, although making a screenplay of the source novel, 'Red Alert', had begun in 1962.  Definitely a child of it's times.

     Since it ends with most of Hom. Sap. projected to be wiped out by mutually assured destruction, 100% an extinction entry.

The End

     I feel they missed out a few honourable mentions in this category.  What about Robert Altman's 'Quintet', set in a new ice age that has depopulated the world?  Or any George Romero zombie films, where one character explicitly states that humans are outnumbered by zombies 400,000 to 1?  Or the 1980 'Virus', which wipes the world out not once, but twice?

     And with that, we are done on the subject of '20 Best Human Extinction Movies'.

The Sky Is Falling Part Three

Nothing About Chickens Or Flying Cities Today

I do like to keep switching things around, just so you don't get bored.  Rather than deal with folklore or polymath scientists, today we are going to look at the metaphor of the sky falling in, as it applies to the residents of Krim and Sevastopol, which are the two oblasts in that peninsula.  Art!

Minas Tirith, Gondor

     Why do we have a Tolkeinberg as our first illo?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Hilariously, the orcs infesting Sevastopol like to call their city 'Minas Tirith' as they are both delusional and free from the consequences of defamation and libel.  They like to believe they are the White City, when in fact they are more akin to Minas Morgul, the fallen sister city ensconced in the Vale Of Morgul.  Art!

Sevastopol Harbour on Navy Day

     I bet the OSHA would absolutely blot them with fines if they carried out an inspection.  Probably have a pretty small electricity bill thanks to all that bio-luminescence.

     ANYWAY Conrad will now consider Sevastopol to be 'Minus Tirith' alongside Saint Petersbug and Barad-Duh.

     Let us now return to the matter of the sky falling down, in the form of Ukrainian drones that are reigning chaos and destruction across the peninsula of Krim.  I am indebted to 'Suchomimus' over on Youtube for providing screenshots for some of the 38 (!) targets hit overnight in Krim by the Kozaky's angry birds.  Art!

     From upper port these are: a control tower, a power station, a radome and an electrical sub-station.

     These strikes did not come out of nowhere.  For a couple of years now, Ukraine has been repeatedly and consistently targeting the orc's SAM and radar systems across Krim, leaving them increasingly blind and unable to intercept incoming Firepoint 1 and 2 drones.  Allow the Tweeter 'Dronebomber' to illuminate the process - Art!

     It's anyone's guess how many drones actually headed for Krim, as Ol' Droney's paths are deliberately approximate and vague, but at least 38 got through.  One orc posted a tragic vlog of how the lack of fuel is causing businesses to close down and lay employees off, so now they lack an income in addition to the lack of fuel, power, trains, planes, buses and food.

     Here the sky is indeed falling down, and bringing the Berlin 1945 experience home to the Ruffians.  Art!

     Having set up the Intro for our third session dealing with '20 Best Human Extinction Movies', let us now proceed and see if the sky, does, indeed, fall down.

"THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (2008)": Stopping all vehicular activity across the globe is hardly an extinction-level event, especially with the alien power doing the stopping ensuring that all airplanes land safely.  Art!

     That's GORT, the Giant Nano-Mallet behind Klaatu.  At the film's climax it disintegrates into a voracious cloud of nanobots that eat their way out of confinement and proceed to devour all mechanical artefact in their path.  That's more like it!  Art?

     Also any Hom. Sap. who get in the way.  The swarm is initially confined to Virginia and gets de-activated before it gets to more of South Canada.  So, the Septics got a good shoeing whilst everyone else got off scot-free.  Works for me, and once again, NOT an extinction.

"INTERSTELLAR": Yes, I've seen it several times and thoroughly enjoyed it, especially as it tries to base itself on real-world physics and principles, rather than warp drives and anti-gravity coils.  Art!

     Matt about to unfreeze a 'corpsicle'.  

     At the beginning of the film, we are treated to an Earth in decline, where food production is very much more important than the latest jet fighter or supercomputer, but this is nowhere near extinction.  Just saying.  Nolan seems to be re-imagining the Okie dust-bowl of the Depression, with sarcastic robots to boot.  No, really, the robots are a deadpan hoot.  Art!

This is 'TARS', which Conrad fondly imagines means 'Total Autonomous Robot Sarcaster'.  

      ANYWAY the film ends up with our protagonists returning from their decades-long sojourn in space - courtesy of getting too close to a black hole for chronological stability - to orbital environments around Saturn that mimic Earth as it was before the impending ecocide.  Art!

     ONCE AGAIN 'Top Movies' is reaching, the distance in this case being over five miles.  Hom. Sap. has NOT undergone extinction, quite the opposite, they are thriving.  What you have here is abandonment, not apocalypse.

"I AM LEGEND (2007)": FINALLY!  Yes, another definite extinction level event film, where Will Smith's character is the Last Man On Earth.  Or perhaps that should be 'Last Human On Earth', as everyone on the East Coast of South Canada has been transformed into a CGI zombie.  SORRY! - neo-vampire or somesuch.  Art!

     As a remake the title doesn't make much sense.  In the original 1964 'Last Man On Earth' Doctor Morgan is up against a functioning society of vampires, that see him as the monster, the creature of legend, whom is dedicated to tracking down and destroying them.  There is no such ethos or creed in the 2007 version as the 'Darkseekers' are a howling mob of bloodthirsty - literally! - naked savages.  Art!

     If I looked like that I'd seek the dark, too.

     The statistics definitely back this one up on being an ELE, with 90% of Hom. Sap. being killed by the virus, 9% turning into Barkeepers and 1% of humans surviving thanks to immunity.  

     Shall we keep going?  Yes let's!

"THE TERMINATOR": This one falls into two camps: the non-extinction bit set in the present-day, where Hom. Sap. blithely goes about it's business, entirely unaware that the future brings a fall from grace.  Second camp is the brief vignettes we get of the post-apocalyptic future, in which Hom. Sap. is definitely an endangered species, as informed by Reese, where humanity was in danger of being utterly obliterated by Skynet.  Art!

     From what we know in T2, the Northern Hemisphere was nuked into mutual oblivion, with probably 95% of the population being turned into glowing charcoal flinders.  However - that word again! - his does leave about 60 million survivors, although they would be scattered and initially defenceless against Skynet and it's metal minions.  So yes, an ELE movie without a doubt.  Art!

Don't mention drones!

"ARMAGEDDON": At which point Your Humble Scribe pretty much decided that this whole list had been created, curated and commented upon by AI, rather than Hom. Sap.  DO YOU WANT SKYNET?  BECAUSE THIS HOW YOU GET SKYNET!  'Armageddon' is quite possibly the poster child for 'Blockbuster' and a summer tentpole film, with an ensemble cast, orange filter, slow-mo walking and science they got off the back of a packet of Fruit Loops.  Art!

     It features howlers as in 'O man!  Who brings a gun to space?' when both the 'Armadillo' vehicles mount a Vulcan cannon rotary-action weapon.  As well as 'He must be suffering from Space Madness' which you'd expect from a 'Ren and Stimpy' cartoon.

     Once again, beating you over the head with it, THERE IS NO EXTINCTION.  In fact, when Bruce Willis shows up you know the asteroid on a collision course is doomed.  Doomed, I tell you!

     O and about that asteroid.  'It's bigger than Texas'.  Except no it's not.  All the large asteroids have been mapped and measured and none are bigger than Texas in any dimension, so there's that.  Nor is that all.  An asteroid that large would be ridiculously easy to track in space, to such an extent that it's orbit could be predicted accurately for years ahead.  The idea that it could 'sneak up on' Earth is, once again, truly worthy of Ren and Stimpy.  Art!

Bruce tries to recall if it's the Blue or Red button he presses

     Okay, we've now covered 15 of the 20 on the TM list.  Conrad now has to work up an Intro for the last 5.  I bet you can hardly wait.

The Sky Is Falling Part Two

I Don't Plan To Have A Long Intro To The Intro

But we'll see how this goes, as a creative head of steam and nobody to edit means we may ramble a bit.  Then again, you wouldn't be here if you wanted veracity, celerity or brevity, would you?  Art!

     Just to display as proof that I've completed the 1,000 piece 'Avengers' jigsaw, including the piece of Thor's ankle that I dropped on the floor three days ago and which has been cunningly hiding from sight under a bit of cabling.

     ANYWAY Conrad did wonder about which came first, the Chicken Littlewit or the egg, which in this metaphor is the television series 'The Avengers' or the comic.  It turns out the television series, which allows me to put up an illo.  Art!

     Honor Blackman resplendent in leather as 'Kathy Gale' and indeed she was a storm force to be reckoned with.

     ANYWAY AGAIN we return to 'The Sky Is Falling Down' theme, and as telegraphed above we're going to look at the idiots first, beginning with Chicken Little, whom flew - do you see what I - O you do - into a panic when an acorn fell on her head, immediately pole-vaulting to the conclusion that the sky was falling.  Art!

     Along the way to inform the King of this salient fact, the fowl manages to co-opt Henny Penny, Loosey Goosey and Lucky Ducky into her panic-parade.  I would suggest a high-fibre diet for Goosey, and Ducky to change her name, as the collective of chuckleheads get eaten by Foxy Loxy.  Doesn't sound very lucky to me.  Fortunately for Loxy, Littlewit avoided recruiting Hound Abound, Rhino Albino or Welephant.  Art!

     No, that is NOT Brian May, the guitarist from Queen.  It's Sir Isaac Newton, whom developed the Universal Theory Of Gravitation after observing an apple fall to the ground from an - you may be ahead of me here - apple tree.  Contrary to popular legend, he was not struck on the head by said apple, but if he was then Conrad sincerely doubts he would have gone raving off to the court of King Charles II about it.

     Okay, back to that somewhat inaccurate list compiled by 'Top Movies' about '20 Best Human Extinction Movies' since many do not reallllly feature extinction.  Art!

Tripod skirmish line with sweepers

"WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005)":  Yes, the Spielberg iteration, with Tom Cruise not saving the human race; rather, airborne pathogens fatal to the invading Martians see them off.   Humanity is not rendered extinct, even if Hom. Sap. is severely whittled down.  Art!

     A bit of property renovation also needed, but nothing that a bit of duct tape and Gorilla Glue can't fix.  

"THE MIST": Again, TM is over-reaching.  At most the atmospheric phenomenon, that shrouds the appearance of multiple monsters of various sizes, is restricted to the New England geographical area of New England in South Canada.  Hardly a global problem.  South Canadian exceptionalism at work again!  Art?

     You need an industrial-size can of Raid, mate.  

     The ending is both extremely weak, as the lead protagonist CANNOT COUNT when it comes to bullets, and completely undercuts the 'extinction' criteria, as the South Canadian army, rolling heavy with main battle tanks, turns up to save the day.  Apart from those who have become monster chow or SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER un-alived themselves.  Art!

Or flamethrowers.  Flamethrowers work as well.

"CONTAGION": This one gets an honourable mention, coming as it did in the aftermath of SARS, and predicting, in an over-the-top manner, how COVID-19 was going to impact the world nine years later.  Art!

     You might compare it to 'Outbreak' on a global scale and Hom. Sap. gets truly centimated as 25 million die from the virus before a vaccine is developed.  So, no extinction, especially as the disease is only (!) fatal in 25% of cases.  HOWEVER - ah that word again! - losing that many people causes chaos worldwide as things like rubbish removal and potable water services suffer.

"ANNIHILATION":  More reaching, since this deals with an area similar to 'The Zone' in 'Stalker', meaning it's a strictly limited area, even if it is expanding, and moreover it's in South Canada so we here in This Sceptred Isle are safe for decades, yah boo sucks to be you.  Art!

      The story is about an all-female exploratory team venturing into 'The Shimmer', where all sorts of weird things are going on, animals and plants are mutating and exploration teams coming to grief as they also change.  SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER The Shimmer itself gets annihilated thanks to <checks script> use of phosphorus grenades.  Glad it was that easy.  And, to underline the point, NO extinction, apart from The Shimmer.  Art!

Pod People?

"KNOWING":  This one does indeed deliver on the extinction front, getting there through an implausible plot full of holes and hokey, involving extra-terrestrials, predictive numbering - but only for South Canada - time capsules, people unable to use a pen and paper and 'whispering'.  Art!

     Yep, the whole planet and everyone remaining on it is completely destroyed by a gigantic solar flare, the end.  Sorry if that spoiled it for you*.  

     Okay, there we are half-way through, as good a place as any to stop and move on to other items.

What On Earth?

Another of those oddities that keep cropping up on Youtube between and in vlogs I'm watching, and this one is quite bizarre.  Art!

     Okaaaaay, a Chicken Coop Clearance sale, which I screenshotted well before mentioning Chicken Littlewit, so that's not the cause of the algorithm going weird.  Conrad vaguely remembers there was another advert about earthquake and solar-flare resistant plastic chicken coops so assumes this follows on from that.  Also, this structure looks enormous, there's no way I'd be able to fit it into the backyard and have room for anything else.

Conrad: Combatting Clickbait One Culprit At A Time

Yes, 'Daily Express' I'm looking - more accurately, glaring - at you.  They keep doing this with films and television programs and we here at BOOJUM! have had enough.  Art!

     The show is 'Mr. In-between', concerning the violent criminal Ray, whom you see above, and if he's smiling, it's going to be the bad hair day to end all bad hair days for some unfortunate soul.  He's also the divorced father to a young teenaged girl, to whom he tries to be the best dad possible, hence the 'in-between' part of the title.  Ray isn't especially big or muscly, just frighteningly intent when it comes to dishing out the damage.  He operates on a strict moral code, which is not yours or mine, but it's his and he sticks to it.

     The overall critical consensus is that series kicks bottom and you're better off for watching it.

Like A Bridge Over Rubled Waters

Yes, I'm afraid that Krim and it's problems is getting another mention.  Art!

'Krimskiy' Most Lomitsiya- 'Crimean Bridge Backlog'

     There are a couple of film clips and still doing the rounds that purport to be queues of traffic at the Kerch Strait Bridge.  In fact they show a huge traffic jam in Armenia.

    What you see above is the real thing, but well out of date.  There are now something along the lines of 2,500 orc cars waiting to leave via the bridge, while the Ukrainians leave it standing, with delays of up to 5 hours.  The security people are going over every single car with dogs and mirrors and hand-held gadget detectors to ensure no more car bombs get onto the bridge.

     Putinpot, of course - obviously! - has completely ignored Krim and it's Krisis, as he doesn't want to acknowledge anything negative.

     The time to watch the bridge will be when outgoing traffic dwindles to naught, as then the Kozaky won't have a reason to leave it standing.  Art!

     If nature doesn't intervene first.

Finally -

Darling Daughter is up for a late Fathers' Day visit and I now have a box of assorted Turkish Delight, which I will only eat a single piece of per day.  Promise.

*  But not much.

The Sky Is Falling!

Not Literally

Just so we're clear.  For one thing, the sky, being a rather immaterial object, is not capable of falling.  Nowhere in recorded history has the atmosphere at any one point on the Earth's surface collapsed to sea level; for one thing, IT HAS NEVER HAPPENED and for another, the atmosphere, being fluid, would flow in to fill the gap.  Art!

     Here an aside.  Yes, already!  In 'Earthman, Come Home' the author James Blish describes a rogue Okie city, the 'Interstellar Master Traders', originally Gravitogorsk, Mars, which became known as 'The Mad Dogs' thanks to their rapine and pillage of an entire planet.  They were one of the first wave of cities to go 'Okie', that is, travelling space to locate work; consequently, the substratum that the entire city was bedded down in was immensely thick, weighing several million tons, as compared to the much sleeker later Okie cities.  Thus the song chorus -

"IMT made the sky -

Fall!"

     worryingly intimates that IMT packed enough mass to be able to target an opponent city, fly over it and drop down on it, crushing their enemy.  Art!

You get the picture

'Ah, that's just Conrad reaching desperately,' I hear you quibble.  Alright.  Art!

     ANYWAY 'The sky is falling!' was by way of an introduction, for I watched and annotated a Youtube compilation vlog by 'Top Movies' - an inaccurate name if ever there was one - titled '20 Best Human Extinction Movies'.  This seems to be a formula they use of '20 Best <insert trope here>'

     Perhaps a better title for today's blog would be 'The sky has already fallen and here we are living in the ruins of it', except that's a lot less succinct and probably exceeds title character count.  

     ANYWAY AGAIN why would people want to watch such a horrid bleak screen manifestation of Hom. Sap's end?  Well, you can ardently watch the end of humanity whilst snacking on Doritos and ice cream, sat comfortably on the settee with the aircon on.  That's one.  Art!

The effect is chilling

     Then again, contending with the End Of The World As We Know It means being able to ditch your daily nose-grindstone interface and concentrate on survival at all costs - or would you, the viewer, maintain the moral high ground and retain your conscience and scruples?  Conrad is unsure if he could deal with a post-apocalyptic world if it couldn't supply loose-leaf Darjeeling and flush toilets.

     I need to apologise for this intro to the Intro for being so long, it was supposed to be a paragraph and instead we have a novella.

     ANYWAY ANYWAY let us bring on the list that TM compiled, with my trenchant critique attached to each.  Let me also add that, thanks to the peculiar way the 'narrator' pronounced certain names, this is almost certainly AI-generated.

'THE ROAD': Yes the depressingly bleak Viggo Mortenson film, that also boasts Guy Pearce in the promotion even if he's only present for 30 seconds at the end.  Art!

     There you go, the titular road.  I have to say, as much of a downer as the film is, it's a lot better than the book, which is essentially two people scrabbling about on a giant heap of rubbish, with McMurtry's peculiar and hard-to-make-sense-of punctuation, or lack of it.  He also chickens out on explaining exactly what the 'extinction' event is, except that it creates lots of ash, which is still falling years later.  Hang on a second - yes, unsurprisingly it didn't make a profit.  Who knew!   Art?

     That's not to say it's a bad film, the acting is top-notch, but you're only going to watch it once unless you enjoy being miserably depressed, in which case lay in your wheely-bin of popcorn.

"THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW": Another one I've seen, and one that rather ignores the 'Extinction' of the title.  What it means is 'South Canada suffers terribly, at length, with father and son desperately trying to survive the new Ice Age or and other stuff elsewhere'.  Art!

     The designer here did a terrific job of presaging what disasters happen.  For starters, this is happening in New York, thanks to the Statue Of Liberty.    There has been a fearful inundation, because the statue is buried up to the head, and the whole expanse is frozen solid.  

     In themes and images, this is about the polar opposite of 'The Road' with a plot that is utter bunkum compounded by sheer wiffle, and with an added lard of piffle, too.  "The neutrinos are mutating!" remains a classic howler.  The budget was $125 million, or 5 x The Road's, and it netted $550 million at the box office, making a profit of at least $100 million.  The final scenes prove that this film is, definitely, NOT an extinction movie.

      Blimey, we're over 800 words in and only two films covered - I'm going to continue and make the whole blog about this or we'll never get through all 20 films.  Art!

Blockbuster versus realistic misery and squalor

"MELANCHOLIA": Aha, one by that arch Danish miserablist, Lars Von Trier, and I haven't seen it, nor is there any danger I will do, as it sounds long, dull and arty to the extreme.  It's definitely an extinction film as Planet Earth gets totally scragged at the end - sorry if that spoiled it for you but it saves you sitting through three and a half hours of grim resignation.  TLDR Planets collide, everyone dies.  Art!

"Snowpiercer": One for rail buffs.  Another new Ice Age has arrived, and what's left of Hom. Sap. is aboard a train that endlessly traverses - you may be ahead of me here - the railways.  It lays the class-war message on with a JCB, not merely a shovel.  I have seen it but cannot recall anything except the ending, when three surviving survivors are about to encounter a hungry polar bear.  Hungry polar bears, as you should surely know, see Hom. SAP. as walking pork chops.  This last scene is supposed to prove that life is not extinct but our surviving survivors soon will be.  Art!

No shortage of ice cubes for drinkies!

     One polar needs to consume a whole seal every 10 days or so, so there has to be a sustainable seal population for the bear to thrive.  For the seals to survive they, in turn, need a viable fish population to feed on, whom in turn need a stable population of krill to dine upon.  So there is an ecological ladder implied by the polar bear -

  - but it's still going to dine on Hom. Sap. 

     Whilst the film barely broke even on a $40 million budget, there was enough interest for a television series to be made.  I've not seen it but Wonder Wifey seems to like it.

'CHILDREN OF MEN': Conrad can definitely get behind this one, it's an excellently filmed and scripted and acted film, adapted from the novel by P D James.  The central premise is horrifyingly simple: 18 years ago the world was subject to universal male sterility, no new babies being born after that date.  Art!

     Elsewhere, the world has collapsed into anarchy and chaos, but This Sceptred Isle is still struggling on, under martial law, where un-aliving tablets are promoted on television and furriners are locked up in camps.  It's a long, slow decline that mirrors the gradual loss of hope in society, until the glimmer of redemption at the end.  Bleak but not totally, and, as I keep saying, one of the best depictions of urban combat ever put on screen.

      Okay, that's a quarter of the list done, with only one that makes a bodge of the 'extinction' in the TM title.  I shall continue at a later stage and bet you can hardly wait.