Last night l sat down and watched the Nicholas Cage disaster Movie Knowing and it struck me that there seems to have been an upsurge in the last decade in the release of disaster movies.
Why is that?
Let's not get too freaked out straight away, i'm not a member of the Left Behind crowd or anything, but my curiosity started to get the better of me the more l thought about it.
We have had disaster movies since we have had cinema, one of the first examples being the film Fire! by James Williamson in 1901 and through the years we have seen many more examples.
One of my biggest pub arguements with friends when we talk movies is my unwavering belief that the late, great Charlton Heston can easily be describes as the longest lasting action hero in film history if you look at his film roles from his role of Brad Braden in the 1952 film The Greatest Show On Earth all the way through to his 1992 role of Captain Al Haynes in "Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232" , and while men with bigger physiques (and vastly inferior acting skills) ruled the roost for nearly twenty years, culminating in Ben Stiller's scathing dissection of the role and the type of leading men chosen in the hilarious Tropic Thunder, to me Heston was the best of the bunch.
The biggest change in the last 15 years in my opinion has been the quality of special effects leading with the new master of the disaster movie Roland Emmerich and his blockbuster hit Independence Day and moving on through the two major asteriod movies Armageddon and Deep Impact all the way through to The Day After Tomorrow and The Core.
The over-riding element in all of these films is that at the end there is still hope for humanity. Some how the human race goes on on this planet, but watching the film Knowing and watching these trailers for the movie 2012, based on the final date on the ancient Mayan calender there seems to have been a shift towards a lack of either redemption or hope.
Am l over-egging this?
To be honest l don't know. The movie Knowing was pretty much panned by the critics and didn't make as much money as they thought, but as someone who watched and actually liked The Postman (and the other post-apocalypse Costner movie Waterworld), l do wonder about these things.
Certain types of films will always have an audience. The Left Behind series is popular with a certain type of Christian, but frankly is not my cup of tea. There's a kind of smugness in them l don't find edifying.
As l said above Roland Emmerich is the undisputed king of the disaster movie genre and no-one destroys famous monuments and landmarks in the way that he does, but to me this film does move thing in a direction l am not entirely comfortable with. The last six months have shown that there are some very easily influenced people out there who believe in things that are not going to happen, the case of Richard Poplawski sadly being the best example.
You also have a VERY large group of evangelicals who believe that the world will end in their lifetime, meaning this (and MY) lifetime so ignore all concerns with environment etc, as in their minds there is nothing to worry about, god will sort it out.
Am l wrong to be more than a little freaked out by the idea of a large group of people eagerly waiting for the world to end, some with access to large amounts of deadly military weapons?
The idea of one of them going all "Jim Jones" while attached to the nuclear codes isn't one that leaves me in a happy place but l am wondering if this is a part of the reason why 2012 is coming out.
People rubber-neck at crashes, explosions and fires. Who is to say that a film dealing with the destruction of the world and the end of mankind doesn't give them the "little starburst" moments Rich Lowry loves so much?
As l say, i'm just asking.