Wednesday, March 27

Unhappy New Years: what can we learn from movies set in 2022? | Films


IIt has become quite difficult to gauge the annual relative tragedy quotient. (For the future reference of misery-focused sociologists, that’s the ARQT.) 2021 was a year of tribulation that closed with a throwback to the same rampant viral spread that we saw in box one of the pandemic that just won’t end. but hey, at least it’s not 2020 anymore. As it becomes clear that we’ll have to accept some massive catastrophes like the new status quo, assessing quality of life becomes a matter of degrees, weighing each new tranche of difficulties against the last. It may be a bit of comfort to note that things, in numbers, have improved slightly since last year. The corollary to this way of thinking, however, is the realization that our circumstances can always get worse.

Just take a look at the movies set in the year 2022, united because they agree that something horrible is waiting to happen. There is a futuristic glow to the number, as if a robot stutters while giving a reading of two, that forced a handful of filmmakers to select this date as the point at which a major crisis occurs. Whether it’s a serendipitous Armageddon landing at an inopportune moment or an overflow our species has been building for years, the movies have marked 2022 as cursed. The only hope as we approach the start of another year is that whatever challenges await us, they will not serve the dire finality of the world’s finalists listed below. Read on for a smorgasbord of possible apocalypses imagined for the next few months, and take some comfort in the little consolation that we have yet to start eating each other:

The dark side of the moon

Long before Carey and Chad Hayes made a name for themselves writing 2013’s The Conjuring, the twin brothers wrote the script for this direct-on-video cult classic about a crew of astronauts venturing into a galactic no-man’s-land. They have entered the vacuum of low orbit to repair a nuclear-armed satellite, but a power outage sends them floating helplessly toward a long-missing NASA shuttle that they board for help. The cat and mouse game that follows is too bizarre in its details to be dismissed as the Alien. scam seems to be; The reanimated corpse and the leather dominatrix robot set us up for the big reveal that the stalker who kills the scouts is actually Satan himself. (Turns out this season is hovering over the Bermuda Triangle.) As the unfortunate turns of events go by, this one isn’t that bad, by its very contained and remote nature. If the devil turns out to be one of next year’s main antagonists, we should be very lucky to keep him trapped in outer space.

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Soylent Green

Soylent Green, as you may already know from pure cultural osmosis, is people. In Richard Fleischer’s infamous sci-fi thriller, NYPD detective Frank Thorn gets maximum validation for his paranoia about the miracle food product mass produced by an obscure corporation, for which the magic ingredient turns out to be the finely ground corpses of the lower class. Screenwriter Stanley Greenberg (and Harry Harrison, author of the novel Make Room! Make Room! Which inspired the film) got the money right in their vision of an economy stratified by scarcity, as overpopulation, pollution and a cataclysm Eerily prophetic climate exacerbates hunger and poverty. That said, we haven’t resorted to devouring each other yet – that seems like the only taboo that will remain despite mounting despair, but we’re not that far off from Snowpiercer’s future of nutrient-rich sustenance bars. made with mashed cockroaches. Once we’ve cleared the global cabinets of real food, we’ll have no choice but to turn on what’s simply edible.

Tomorrow’s war

Last summer’s direct-drive Chris Pratt vehicle didn’t make the impact that a producer might expect on a $ 200 million budget, but it is based on an idea with deep resonance to this day: that it belongs to those who live now. to anticipate and deny the conflicts that the next generation will face. In 2022, the emissaries of the year 2051 materialize with a warning of an imminent alien invasion twenty-six years later, and beg for the help of today’s armed forces to time travel forward so they can help defeat the aliens. threat. Pratt’s Green Beret turned super soldier falls on the beasts nicknamed “Whitespikes”, only to discover that in order to completely purge the Earth of these hostiles, he will have to go back to his own time and act now. (It’s worth noting that the aliens were actually submerged in a glacier and released by the melting of global warming.) It goes to show that the old saying is correct: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of full-blown military offensives.

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The purge

When the lucrative horror-specific franchise first launched with this flagship film, 2022 was far enough away to allow acclimatization to an unthinkable way of life. The nightmare of survival takes place after eight successful celebrations of the Purge, the annual holiday during which all crimes are legal, allowing America to unleash its pent-up anger and relax for 364 days a year. Although this series has yet to realize the full disturbing potential of its witty premise, its name has been invoked to describe what happens in real life more frequently of late. During the run-up to the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s favorite alarming tactic was to paint a picture of Joe Biden’s America as a lawless hell where marauding gangs wreaked havoc with impunity. In reality, the tone of the unease is almost exactly the opposite of that articulated in the film; Rather than the barely repressed fanaticism that fuels the Purge on screen, the demonstrations of destruction during the protests were motivated by demands for justice, far from the chaos itself that this film envisions.

There is no escape

Martin Campbell’s animated B-movie shows a pickaxe-shaped Ray Liotta for former Marine John Robbins, a man incarcerated for the murder of his commanding officer in Benghazi. He is sent to the penal colony on the island of Absolom, where the worst of the worst have been left to their own murderous devices and divided between warlike and savage outsiders and civilized and human insiders. The Robbins-led miniature revolution didn’t have much information to shed on the prison state debate at the time of its launch, but today, it seems like a comically hulking version of a real problem. Its guiding principle that inmates are stripped of their dignity by a system that treats them as easily exploited personal property is true, if made more shocking by advances in public understanding of this regrettable situation. We can only hope we have a leader as noble as character actor Lance Henriksen to expose the rotting treatment in the prison industrial complex.

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Geostorm

Well, the good news is that we have not yet implemented the use of widespread climate control satellites, so inclement conditions at the level of annihilation on a global scale may not be on the cards. That’s the armageddon the human race faces in Dean Devlin’s admirably silly eco-show, in which space cowboy Gerard Butler represents our last line of defense against the certain death of Mother Nature. The opening salvoes before the much-dreaded main event that gives this film its title are pretty bad, from typhoons drowning skyscrapers to torrential lightning rains that scorch city blocks to a crisp. It’s all a bit of the Roland Emmerich store brand in amazed photography, but the natural events of Biblical ruin are becoming woefully common. Even if Butler has a larger than life figure, the threat he faces still speaks to a legitimate fear that many of us grapple with whenever we open a newspaper. His character and his power to stop Doomsday is a reassuring fiction, the only man who can change a destruction the rest of us cannot stop.


www.theguardian.com

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