Cosmic mayhem: Why Hollywood wants to blow up the world
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Hollywood is supposedly filled to the brim with wacky environmentalists trying to save the planet. So why do so many filmmakers spend all their waking hours on this planet making movies about destroying it?
It’s a grand puzzlement, unless you believe -- gasp -- that real Benjamin Franklin greenbacks trump Green Power sloganeering every time. But Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy has a good time wrestling with the question in a new essay that, if nothing else, reminds us of just how much planetary mayhem has occurred in recent films at the multiplexes.
Her examples include ‘Watchmen’ (where nuclear conflagration is just minutes away) and the recent hit ‘Knowing,’ where Nic Cage is our last hope to save the planet. She notes that two of this summer’s most anticipated box-office behemoths are ‘Terminator Salvation’ and ‘2012,’ both of which involve potential planetary demolition. Kennedy also lumps in destruction sequences from such family films as ‘Monsters vs. Aliens’ (where the Golden Gate Bridge is gleefully wrecked) and ‘Wall-E,’ which is set in a city that bears the unmistakable look of post-apocalypse. So what is going on here?
I’d contend that much of the issue simply involves the fact that commercial movies have become a special-effects play toy, with filmmakers eagerly trying to outdo each other with eye-popping new visual trickery. And of course, if you’re going to wow audiences, what better to wow them with than epic fantasies of Earth-wide destruction? Kennedy is clearly thinking along similar lines, though she’s concerned that many of the films aren’t just spectacular, but spectacularly cynical. As she puts it:
‘Only too often, the worst plays out like a blip in the screenplay. Cataclysm is a plot point, not an end point. But as their bag of tricks gets heftier, shouldn’t filmmakers’ ethical burden grow as well? Does having the shock-and-awe tools for depicting mass destruction for mass distraction mean that we should use them? ... What was once cathartic seems exploitative. Which leaves us unsettled and wondering: Has the end of the world lost its sting?’
She offers a smart look back at the various golden eras of Hollywood end-of-the-world drama, including the B-movies of the 1950s (‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ being the classic example) as well as ‘70s studio disaster flicks like ‘Earthquake’ and ‘The Poseidon Adventure.’ When will it all end? Not soon, Kennedy admits: ‘Disaster flicks, like slasher films, have started to sell FX realism as its own reason to be. [But] filmmakers seem set on a course in which ever-scarier versions of demise are fine, as long as the box office confirms their success.’