When one apocalypse just isn't enough

[sigma7]

Hey, is today not gloomy enough to fit into this morbid week of shuffling-off of various media icons? You know what you need? Early 1980s nuclear armageddon films, in their entirety. Have you not seen The Day After (directed by Nicholas Meyer of Star Treks II and VI) or Threads? The most significant omission from the list I can see is When the Wind Blows, but five outta six ain't bad.

Comments

[rainfletcher.livejournal.com]

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.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

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.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

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! ;-)