sigma7 | When one apocalypse just isn't enough

I watched "Threads" this past fall. Or, at least tried: I think I got through about 85% before the bleakness got to me. "The Day After" I've seen in its entirety, but only after I moved here so I could happily recognize what was done blown up.

Back to the shuffling-off: I've become fascinated with this video.

Oh, it gets even bleaker, but I don't suppose that's spoileriffic -- I think even when the narrative becomes slogged down it's interesting in a purely cerebral exercise of just how bad it becomes.... I also remember "Testament," which manages to be a happy medium between the two, I think.

And Hugh is the salve that heals all wounds. Stephen is the...gauze? Uhm. Hrm. Need better metaphor....

The interesting thing about 'Threads' is I believe it was made in direct retaliation for all those American films where people just got under their desks and could walk outside the very next day.

Someone sort of wanted to give people a reality check, thus the bleakness since it was as close to reality as they could guess at.

It's funny, because Threads, The Day After and Testament are cut from the same cloth -- I think they're all similar reactions to (a) the notion that such an event would be survivable and (b) that survival would not necessarily be preferable. I don't think any of them is necessarily bleaker than the other -- hell, they could all be vignettes from the same universe, just different locales, different scopes -- and none of them conducive to a good night's sleep.

And there are those who've weighed in saying that, at least specifically in The Day After, that the scenario presented was unreasonably optimistic.

If we survive long-term as a species past this "teetering on the brink of self-annihilation" bridge we've dangled our feet over, they'll look back on us like we were psychotic cavemen.

I'm very much hoping our better natures win out. We're already seeing that the next generation, kids and those who are just becomming teenagers are much more switched on then we ever were. I'm hoping each successive generation grows up kinder and more aware of the fact we live in a fragile ecosystem that it's up to us to protect. We are the only species on the planet that has the ability to protect the whole thing. If that's our evolutionary purpose then we need to stop dicking around and do it.

I love armageddon themed stuff :P

Special Bulletin was nightmare fodder for weeks if not months, and perhaps as a consequence, I haven't seen any of the other nuke-o-rama movies on that list.

Normally, I find apocalyptic stories oddly fascinating, but that one, perhaps because of the way it was done to look like a live news broadcast, was ridiculously scary to 12-year-old me.

I've always been a sucker for depictions of mass media during significantly chaotic or apocalyptic scenarios. When done right it's just fantastic and enthralling to me -- when done wrong (I think first of Deep Impact, which, for all its successes, fails miserably with Tea Leoni and MSNBC which at that time was getting spanked in the ratings by PBS and a test pattern) it's just interesting. And it's been this way long before I accidentally landed in my chosen (but not by me) profession.... It relays a great sense of verisimilitude to me, and it has to be done significantly, catastrophically wrong for it to ring falsely (ahem, Tea). And I think that's why I liked Special Bulletin -- which almost doesn't belong on this list, because of all of these films, it's barely apocalyptic at all -- and Countdown to Looking Glass so much. One of these days I'll take a swing at that form....

I'm a sucker for a good ragnarok -- which we don't see in many wide-release movies anymore (with one exception in theaters now, which I'll leave nameless for spoilers' sake). I blame the new world order.

Well, we had The Day After Tomorrow (one could argue whether or not that was a good Ragnarok, of course), and the forthcoming 2012. (Does Roland Emmerich have some sort of unhealthy fetish with destroying world landmarks in his movies, by the way?)

I watched the end of Special Bulletin on the link you provided, just to see the freak-out level of the journalists. The young lady reporter on the yacht, utterly destroyed, largely incoherent, wondering whether or not she's about to die of radiation poisoning... the anchorwoman struggling to hold it together, the elder anchorman impotently saying "Is there -- something -- we can do?" Not to mention the realization that the reporter who just got rescued is now vapor... Those were bone-chilling to me then, and still powerful now.

Especially when, just recently, I saw a recording of Cronkite informing the country of the breaking news that President Kennedy had been killed in Dallas.

Have you ever read The Stand by Steven King? He has a couple of good scenes of media trying to cover the apocalypse against government wishes buried in the other 1300 pages.

I remember seeing Independence Day and thinking, "Oh, thank God, they didn't kill the dog, and let's gloss over the fact that there are probably 50 million people dead as long as Muttley pulls through." (Oddly enough, the virus-upload bit worked for me, if only because I'd read about one of the plot points cut from the final print.) 2012 doesn't have me particularly breathless in anticipation, if only because I don't want to watch an hour of whoever's going to be this movie's Emmy Rossum fretting over Disposable Cast A, Disposable Cast B and being teased for doom but inevitably saved at the last minute -- they have shown no capacity for making me care about the human element, and I'd be shocked if it finally kicked in in this film.

Loved The Stand, less as it wore on, but that's just me -- King excels at those scenes, I think, and his doomsday scenario was previously unexplored and flexible enough to give him plenty of leeway, and he can fill those empty spaces nicely....

Obviously I get to look at a lot of footage of newsies trying to hold it together under unfathomable circumstances, some succeeding, some not, and some succeeding in their failure (Cronkite being the gold standard of that -- to us it seems like such a small moment, but in the context of the time, even in the context of the legacy he leaves, it's just...resonant.)

I'm going to have to download and watch Special Bulletin and Looking Glass again -- I keep getting them confused, because their style is so similar, with the endings and the scopes being the significant disparity.

My immediate response to hearing about 2012--'Wait, I thought the next one in the series was '2061'?' It didn't improve when I saw it was yet another apocalypse movie. With no technophobically-spawned time-travelling robots, either! ;-)

One movie I'd add to that list, though it's not truly apocalyptic in scale (and is more about the people & the potential politics than either apocalytic horror or in swaying viewers), is By Dawn's Early Light. (And boy, what a cast that is.)

Edited 2009-06-27 02:55 (UTC)

I found it on VHS quite a few years ago and bought it, because I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to see it again. (Oh, if only I'd known how glorious the Internets would be....) That's one of the better "apocalyptic" films out there, not only because it's not a mindless slog through unending misery like so many of them are -- the final Looking Glass/AFO pursuit being just brilliant. But tempting as it is to allow that distinction to put it in a sorta sub-apocalyptic genre, I think it the toll it takes on its cast is acceptably bleak.

And dude, Powers Boothe, Martin Landau and James Earl Jones? Hell, it could be a radio play and it'd be no less awesome.

I believe I lost the copy I had taped off of cable in my dad's mold-remediation fiasco (along with just about everything I ever taped), and I haven't yet made an effort to replace it. Perhaps I should.

However, (and keeping in mind that I haven't seen it in probably 15+ years), I think I'd generally categorize it as a military thriller or a disaster movie rather than an apocalyptic film; it seems to have more in common with The Poseidon Adventure or the intro & climax of WarGames than The Day After. (Which I haven't seen since it originally aired--and didn't even see all of it then, as my parents thought I was too young to watch that sort of thing--and that's fine by me.)

I saw the beginning of WarGames for the first time in years the other night -- John Spencer is the man who refuses to turn his key! That's awesome. (And that opening sequence never gets old.)

And By Dawn's Early Light doesn't quite fit into the same mold, you're right...just a touch heavier than Sum of All Fears, really, because there's a sense of something to be saved, of a victory, however Pyrrhic, which none of the other films (Special Bulletin aside) has.

I did finally find Without Warning, with John de Lancie and Jane (Googles the name) Kaczmarek -- not specifically a nuclear apocalypse, but definitely ragnarokic.

Forget 2012 and all that current stuff. The best during and post-armageddon story (of 21st century made stuff) is Jericho. I am hoping that it does get continued before the cast gets too old. I never could catch it on CBS when it was airing, except a bit of one episode which was a clue-revealer of what was going on. I never forgot that, so of course when I found it on CBS.com (which is still there, tho for some reason I think they took off a couple episodes lately) I watched the entire series in one standing. Of course it helped at the time I was out of work therefore had nothing to do besides my body responsibilities. Was the longest show marathon I had ever done. Gerald McRaney was by far my most favorite on the show, being the mayor who managed to keep his sanity when the world around his hometown lost its own.

When one apocalypse just isn't enough

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