Apocalypse Next

Forget vampires, the new movie craze is the end of the world.

There seems to be something in the Hollywood air, probably the CO² levels, that is causing filmmakers to churn out their apocalyptic visions of the future.

James Cameron's 3D movie Avatar, will be released this month and foretells mankind's ruthless invasion of alien planets for resources in the light of Earth running out. Next year sees The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington as a man hunting for a lost book that will redeem mankind from its censurable ways and end the age of post-apocalyptic famine and death. Carriers is out soon and envisions a deadly virus spelling our doomed fate. The Armageddon has even entered the animated sector of the film industry with the release of 9 earlier this year. Calamitous nightmare is becoming a concurrent theme in films to end the decade with.

The current devastation blockbuster in theaters is 2012 and hopefully it will be the worst, because if they get poorer than that we are in for a rough 2010, let alone 2012. Roland Emmerich's film is based solely on the premise that the ominous Mayan prophecy is true, that the world is destined to end in the year 2012, simply because they didn't bother to place any more dates on the end of their calender. Shovel in some dialogue about apocryphal science and you have yourself an apocalypse.

The film would be somewhat less mundane if it was new territory for Emmerich, but tsunamis and earthquakes seem to be his passion and so we are left with simply a different cast of actors in front of a green screen of CGI catastrophe - for the best part of three hours! Yet, the concept has sold. People bought the tickets and propelled it to the number one spot at the box office in its opening week. Disaster definitely equals money.

A more honest film about the gloominess of the mankind's fate is The Road set for release in January next year. The film is based on the fantastic novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy which tells the simple tale of a man and his child journeying south in order to survive the drab post-cataclysmic world. The novel never explains what happened for such circumstances to occur, however judging from the first trailer the film may take the global warming approach to things.

If director John Hillcoat has chosen to imply man's warming of the planet has lead to his demise I would imagine it is merely a device of marketing rather than plot. The film critic Mark Kermode has recounted a conversation with him saying that they had to put guns and action shots in the trailer because that's what the average moviegoer is looking for in a post-apocalyptic film. In reality, the novel (and film so I am told) have very little action, in fact I think nearly all of it is in the aforementioned trailer. Similarly, the executive producers may believe that the audience who have not read the book will desire an explanation, maybe even a moral message if it is going to be somewhat popular and profitable.

This is the crux - why is the end of the world so lucrative? The answer is the current political climate. We are being told constantly to reduce our carbon footprint, that the ice caps are melting and that we need to find new energy resources because fossil fuels are running out rapidly. This message and public awareness can be used as a host for the film industry to make money. It provides a dramatisation of what could happen if we continue as we are - a message that is tangible and vivid, one we do not get from newspaper headlines.

Remove this message and production studios start worrying that the public will not go and see it because it does not relate to the current mindset of the masses. If The Road were being released in the mid '80s I doubt global warming would be to blame. A shot of one faulty, Russian marked nuclear warhead may have crept its way in. But that is almost cliché now; nuclear holocaust is out, global warming genocide and energy depletion disaster are in.

2010 may therefore be 'twilight' in a more literal sense for moviegoers. However, for those who still cannot get enough blood letting action there is Daybreakers out next year which blends the two fads into one big craze ball - vampires, in a future post-apocalyptic world where mankind is on the brink of extinction. They certainly know how to milk the zeitgeist don't they?

The Transatlantic Paradox

Why British drama can never be the quality of its American counterpart.

HBO is a television network that anyone can reason with sensible logic, must have a secret machine deep down in its basement where you insert a few million dollars and it pumps out a brilliantly written, acted and directed hit TV series. Furthermore, and as I am sure that you are aware, the issue has been raised more than once that us British certainly do not have one of these machines trundling away in the depths of Wood Lane. But we are trying!

Yes, trying we are. Earlier this week saw the BBC's new sci-fi thriller Paradox land in our living rooms. A show based around the rather tired concept of people receiving mysterious images from the future. However, Paradox has a clever twist - the images are of future dead people and the people receiving them are detectives. Well you cannot get much more Hollywood than that!

What is more is that it knows its born of modern American cinema. They have held no punches back here. Police speed about the place in jet black cars, they come back and sit in offices that have 3x3 high definition television grids displaying only one image. The mad physicist taps away on his keyboard whilst the viewer is unsure of his true motives. There's even a convenient countdown timer available that allows the interspersing of nail biting shots of it ticking towards "00:00:00" milliseconds after the heroes save the day. And all of this played out to a dramatic soundtrack of an orchestra backed with heavy tremolo synths - a piece undoubtedly inspired by Hans Zimmer's The Dark Knight score.

Yet with all the ingredients in the pot it still doesn't meld. The concept and aesthetics are overblown, the story is dramatic, and the acting is sound but still, I am not looking forward to the next episode of Paradox as I do The Wire. So where lies the fault?

The answer is simple; its just not American. Whether it is factually correct or not, we look at America as the land of bombast, hyperstyle and excess. The cynical amongst us may say that products from over the pond are "all style and no substance" and anyone who has been to a basketball or American football game knows where that stereotype derives from. There are cheerleaders and fireworks, jets flying overhead and cannons blasting every time the home team score - and that's just at college level. Entertainment in the States must be as grandiose and bold as the patriotism that drives so much of the country.

A culture which is not reflected by our own. In fact, much to the contrast of American sensibility the British Zeitgeist can be summarised as doubt, pessimism and the suppression of emotion in public. All of these qualities are exaggerated attempts to appear realistic. We act as if we realise the American dream is never going to happen because it probably will not, where as Americans openly strive towards it hoping it will.

So when this fantasy world is injected into our television shows a gloopy, yawn inducing mess of blandness is the result. It just does not seem right to have people with Scottish and midland accents shouting overly aggressive dialogue whilst speeding to the scene of a precrime before the big red timer beeps to zilch. The zinger, "You're out of your goddamn mind!" was not intended to be said by a blonde forty year old from Ilford, it is inherently American. I imagine the BBC to have got their hands on the blueprints for the HBO machine and they made one. They put all the ingredients in except they changed "Chicago" to "Manchester" and "Laurence Fishburne" to "Tamzin Outhwaite" and out comes Paradox; a pithy Anglicised imitation of a truly American staple mark.