Monday November 16, 2009
Doomsday theory
By JASON LIM
It’s the end of the world and we know it.
DOOMSDAY story-telling pre-dates the advent of cinema. Long before we had silver screens, our ancestors must have also loved sitting round the campfire listening to tales of how – like the dinosaurs – we, too, would one day become extinct. Back then the usual suspects for conjuring such tales were shamans, witchdoctors, prophets and other assorted attention-seekers.
These days, it’s overly-destructive directors of the likes of Michael Bay (Armageddon) and Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012).
2012 is latest film in which the world dies dramatically of natural causes. I suppose because none of us thinks we’re going to actually be around when it happens, our penchant for seeing what the end of the world might look like is seemingly insatiable. Over the years, we have flocked to cinemas to catch alternate variations of the final “the end”.
At least these days, we are less gullible and don’t find ourselves compelled to sacrifice young virgins or bang loudly on pots and pans to keep the doomsday demons at bay. (If anything, we’re only gullible at the mention of two words: special effects.)
Doomsday story-telling in film is a pretty straightforward formula. Principle cast tends to include an everyman usually patriotic and self-sacrificing, a conveniently absent or missing wife, a young teenage couple, and at least one innocent prepubescent child.
Throw in the leader of the free world, the President of the United States of America (because everyone just loves seeing US Presidents stuck in difficult situations) and a dog and you’ve got your doomsday film almost sorted out.
But wait, why is the world ending again?
It really depends on the age we live in. As it turns out, we tend to have collective paranoia triggers that vary according to time (and to some extent special effects capabilities).
Back in the day, everything was biblical. It was all the gods this or the God that. Then film came along and it became more politically sensitive to blame it all on Aliens for awhile. It was also pretty easy to dress up actors as aliens and use miniatures to film things going awry as the world came to the brink of apocalypse.
A short while after that, the cold war erupted and filmmakers lived off our fears of dying in a World War 3-induced nuclear holocaust. I suspect because special effects then was not quite up to scale, films which used nuclear armageddons did so only fleetingly like Mad Max and Planet Of The Apes which only hinted at this and stopped short of showing full blown nuclear devastation.
Then after the iron curtain fell and we seemed safe from World War 3 for awhile, the cool thing to do was to blame the impending end of the world on technology or cybernetic revolt. Back in the 80s when the digital world was still in its infancy and science fiction writers were intellectually original, it seemed a pretty safe bet that if anything could kill us all it would be descendents of our microwaves and hair-dryers.
A little while later, when programmers became more secure with their skills and it seemed a long way off before even the iPod could be invented, let alone a Terminator, filmmakers turned to the growing fear of viruses and disease that stemmed from outbreaks of AIDS and the ebola virus around the early 1990s. These films weren’t very special effects intensive and proved to be borderline boring (save for the more creatively packaged 12 Monkeys starring Bruce Willis alongside Brad Pitt).
Briefly, the choice of doomsday du jour then became bigger and badder – in the form of meteors ala Deep Impact and Armageddon, and the theory proved to be quite a hit (Get it? Kapow!).
Mercifully, Hollywood spared us from too many variations of this, one film where we get struck and one where we don’t was more than enough thank you very much.
Which brings us to present time and you would have guessed by now that the blame has shifted again and we now think if the world were to end, it will be because Mother Nature said so.
This time the harbingers of doom aren’t NASA or the World Health Organisation. It seems to have all started with the Kyoto Protocol, Indian Ocean tsunami and Al Gore instead. Then filmmakers jumped on board and M. Night Shyamalan tried to show us how trees might turn on us in The Happening and The Day After Tomorrow took the devastation level up a hundred or so notches with world-wide cataclysmic destruction.
Just in case we hadn’t gotten the message yet, you can now catch 2012 in cinemas where the world again dies dramatically of natural causes. I suspect the film’s producers knew we were getting tired of that idea and could only take so many repeats of the same idea which is probably why the film was rushed out and released after slightly more than a year of production (shooting began in August 2008).
From the looks of it, 2012 is set to do pretty well and may be one of the better textbook doomsday films. But what I’m more interested in is – what’s next? How else would the world end (on screen)? We’ll just need to look at emerging current events again and see which popular paranoia will next be exploited.
My guess: It will either be God’s wrath again or colliding atoms and the creation of blackholes in labs ... oh wait, weren’t both of those in Angels and Demons?
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