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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Apocalyptic Postulations

I watched the National Geographic show Apocalypse: Population Zero. I have some sort of morbid need to watch these disaster shows where comets, super-volcanos, solar radiation and all matter of devastation is wreaked upon the earth. Some days I think "shit, I hope that doesn't happen, but there ain't a whole lot I could do if it did" and other times I think "bring it the fuck on--humanity sucks and I've had enough already!"
In Aftermath: Population Zero, the human race suddenly and very neatly and cleanly disappears. Although I enjoyed watching the postulations of disaster stemming from nuclear power plants and dams breaking down, and the eventual rebirth of nature that came afterwards, I found this approach to be a bit of a cop-out. Barring there actually being space aliens that for some reason would WANT to bring humans to their home world (or maybe drop them off on their enemy's home world so we could fuck it up) it would be more realistic to depict a scenario wherein some sort of super-microbe or virus wipes out the human race. This would mean that there would be rotting corpses lying around. Aside from the potential for a cool zombie movie to rise from this idea, it would be much more realistic. Come on, humans would never be so polite as to simply wink out of existence a la Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda, leaving no messy, smelly, bacteria factory of a corpse to lie there festering and contaminating the world! I guess the filmmakers didn't want to deal with such ugly realities as starving dogs eating the corpses. They preferred to confine themselves to depicting the breakdown of humanity's constructs and the eventual triumph of nature over her oppressors. Which is cool. After all, it's their film, they can dowhuttheylike.
Personally, I never would have passed up the chance to give a good, ghoulish scenario of rotting corpses littering the landscape. But that's just me.
The special effects were stellar and the finished product was very polished. All in all if disaster scenarios float your boat, then Aftermath is worth a watch.

3 comments:

Tom & Icy said...

Colorado will be the first to go.

Unknown said...

Why? Because of that super volcano under Yellowstone? Actually that will obliterate Wyoming and Montana first! We'll just die of inhaling ash from the pyroclastic cloud.

tsduff said...

I just read I Am Legend on the plane home from Chicago - same sort of theme but extremely tame. I love disaster movies too.