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.