Children of Men. How well does it predict the Coming Global Shitstorm (CGS)?
Perfectly.
20 years from now, after a series of catastrophic meltdowns, random violence, soldiers and cages full of deportees are the norm. Even though everything has gone to shit and there is no future for mankind, people still cling to their meaningless existences and get by with pills. The main character sleepily strolls past walls of soldiers protecting an artificial environment where legal citizens are still free to stumble around buying coffee. In an even more protected environment, we briefly glimpse the rich cavorting in vast picnic grounds.
Humans have carried a fascination with the end of the world for as long as they’ve had imaginations. We must, for our own survival, use our vivid imaginations to dream up scenarios where water, food and shelter cease to exist, where disease and war and pests come and take away everything. We are made that way and science fiction stories about total collapse of civilization are an outgrowth of that. I’m going to devise a theory that every sci-fi construct (zombies, time travel, alien invasion) is an outgrowth of some fundamental human discomfort.
Though it gets the CGS right, it isn’t much of a movie. There are a few important scenes, some sketches of characters and then a long drawn out action sequence at the end that is barely worth watching. The movie is excellent for its imagination of the shitstorm, though, especially the way things appear to stay the same until the shitstorm happens to you. Until it does, we’ll fastidiously maintain our lawnmower while the guy 20 yards to the east maintains his, so when one of us evaporates in tiny mushroom cloud, the other will be able to soldier on.
Well, yeah. What else are you gonna do? Get all survivalist and stockpile spearfishing equipment in your basement while you bone up on your ammo reloading skills, and practice ambush tactics among your 50 gallon drums of beans?
Maybe not fastidiously maintain our lawnmowers, but certainly our bicycles…
well, if I had any energy at all, it would be to get my neighbors together and share one lawnmower. and if any seemed to be about to evaporate in a mushroom cloud, I don’t know, help them out?
I agree about the waste of time last 25…400?…minutes.
Like it up until then.
My neighbor’s lawnmower is the pale horse of the CGS. When he is able to get it started: billowing clouds of purple smoke, gale force winds, holy hell. Scares the crap out of his own high strung amstaff.
Just burned my weekend office time enjoying “pale horse of the CGS.”
This blog entry explains why I hate Hollywood. So much for good ideas, let’s have an action sequence. Although I should say, Michael Cain’s death scene was good.