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| Author | DCM |
| Categories | cinema |
Nicholas Barber of the Guardian looks at our obsession with disaster movies and how the upcoming UK cinema release schedule is packed with big budget love letters to the genre.
Blockbuster season is here again, so the time has come to forget about depressing arthouse dramas for a while, and cheer yourself up with some rousing Hollywood escapism. Just look at what May alone has to offer. For starters, there's Godzilla, which features a town being sluiced by a tsunami, and Bryan Cranston bellowing: "It is gonna send us back to the stone age!" Then there's X-Men: Days of Future Past, which reduces a city to a murky graveyard of fractured skyscrapers. Or how about Tom Cruise's latest, Edge of Tomorrow, in which alien invaders lay waste to half the planet? And before all those, there's Paul WS Anderson's Pompeii: the ideal night out if you want to see crowds of terrified women and children being fried by flaming boulders.
We are living, it seems, in the golden age of the disaster movie. We may call them monster movies or action movies, superhero blockbusters or ancient epics, but let's face it: they're all disaster movies in fancy dress. Whichever genre you think you're paying for, it's harder and harder to find any big-budget Hollywood entertainment that doesn't include the demolition of a major conurbation, and a body count in the tens of thousands.
In some respects, this is business as usual. "In the year that sees Noah and Pompeii released," says John Sanders, the author of Studying Disaster Movies, "it's interesting to go back to early cinema and see the same two events captured again and again, starting with The Last Days of Pompeii in 1900, 1908 and 1913, and Noah's Ark in 1928. Beyond these, films with disaster elements surface every few years. San Francisco, from 1936, had an earthquake. In Old Chicago, from 1937, had a fire. And The Hurricane, also from 1937, had a hurricane – no prizes there."
Noah
The decade which most of us associate with the disaster movie is the 1970s, thanks to the Oscar-nominated Airport, and the various star-stuffed bank-holiday TV staples which followed. But the so-called disasters depicted in The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno look like minor mishaps compared with the earth-shattering cataclysms which Hollywood is so fond of today. In fact, films involving widespread devastation didn't get going until the classic 70s disaster movie was fizzling out.
"The real change came in 1977," says Peter Kramer, a film-studies lecturer at the University of East Anglia. "In Star Wars, the Death Star is shown to destroy a planet, and the whole concept of the film is that unless it's stopped, it will threaten planets all around the universe. From then on, if you study the top-10 hits at the American box office every year, a fair share of them either stage or imply large-scale destruction of a global nature. Superman, for instance, starts with a planet exploding. And in Raiders of the Lost Ark, what would the Nazis do if they could weaponise the Ark? Whether the large-scale destruction is staged, as it is in Terminator 2, or just implied, as it is in Raiders, it has been a prominent, even a dominant theme since 1977."
In part, the film industry's newfound love of mass destruction was sparked by the special-effects advances pioneered by George Lucas, and in part it was due to Hollywood's usual policy of imitating a commercial smash. But the post-Star Wars wave of fictional annihilation was also related to audiences' real-world fears.
"There was extensive polling in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s," says Kramer, "and people really believed that the end was nigh. There was a very widespread awareness of how much damage nuclear weaponry could do, and people truly expected that nuclear Armageddon would happen soon. Another concern was the state of the environment. In polls that were taken in 1965, it didn't register. But by 1970, a good percentage of the population felt that humanity was treating the planet so destructively that it threatened our existence. The Poseidon Adventure and Jaws tapped into those anxieties, but from Star Wars onwards they became an important reference point."
Today, those concerns are more important than ever. The global-disaster movie (the mega-disaster movie? the disaster movie-plus?) has become so commonplace recently that we're now expected to take the most horrific scenarios for granted. Just last year, a delightful children's cartoon, The Croods, showed dozens of species being wiped out by shifting tectonic plates. Two bloke-ish comedies, This Is the End and The World's End, invited us to chuckle as the human race was all but eradicated. Two family-friendly blockbusters obliterated London (thanks, GI Joe: Retaliation and Star Trek Into Darkness), and two monster movies (Pacific Rim and World War Z), obliterated pretty much everywhere else.
Pacific Rim
And it's not just mainstream movies that are in a genocidal mood. "It's intriguing that arthouse cinema has got in on the act," says Sanders. "Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter suggest that oblivion is just around the corner, and if the philosophising minds of von Trier and Nichols are interested, then perhaps it's time to make an apocalypse-proof shelter."
Alas, it may be too late for that. If Hollywood is to be believed, the time for making apocalypse-proof shelters has already been and gone. A decade ago, mega-disaster movies such as 28 Days Later ..., The Day After Tomorrow and Dawn of the Dead were set in recognisable, functioning societies, even if those societies didn't last long once they were hit by an eco-calamity or a zombie plague. But just a few years later, film-makers took the collapse of civilisation as read. The likes of I Am Legend, The Road, Zombieland and The Book of Eli consigned the fall of mankind to opening voiceovers and flashbacks, before turning their attention to the few survivors left scrabbling around in the rubble. And then, last year, things got even more dispiriting. Four separate films – Cloud Atlas, Elysium, Oblivion and After Earth – all posited that we might as well abandon Earth altogether and begin life anew on a space station or a distant planet. In 10 years, we've gone from apocalyptic films, to post-apocalyptic ones, to post-post-apocalyptic ones.
Elysium
If you were to look on the bright side, you could argue that we simply enjoy seeing things being blown to smithereens. "There's a kind of pleasure in destruction," says Sheldon Hall, co-author of Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History. "It's the kind you get from building a sandcastle and then jumping on it as a child. When we watch those elaborate sets blow up in a James Bond film, we know that they're fake, so we appreciate the skill that goes into building them, and the same sort of skill that goes into their destruction. It's all part of the magic of the movies."
But it can't be a coincidence that the images in our multiplexes are so similar to those on the news, whether we're watching footage of Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami or the latest terrorist bombing. In these chaotic times, is it any wonder that we're drawn to films that reframe that chaos as an awfully big adventure?
"All around the world, people are aware of climate change," says Kramer, "That could underpin our sensitivity to stories that respond to such concerns. Let's not forget that Avatar came out on the very weekend that the UN's climate change conference in Copenhagen ended in failure. Avatar was probably consumed by more people in a short space of time than any other story in human history – and it was all about a military-industrial complex intent on ruining a planet."
That's all very well, but apart from making James Cameron even richer, do these mega-disaster movies have any practical purpose? Will Hollywood's doom-mongering prompt impressionable film-goers to change their ways? Well, possibly.
"One thing that a lot of these films have in common is the sense that the threat is not just to me and my family, but to everybody," says Kramer. "They tend to tell stories about isolated groups overcoming their differences to come together and solve their problems. And because these films reach different communities around the planet, they might just foster a sense of solidarity and prepare the ground for some sort of collective action in the future. They reach into us and respond to a need that we have – a hope that if we get together, we can make a difference."
This article originally appeared on the Guardian 28/04/2014