A 2001 apocalypse movie, Ever Since the World Ended, is being released on DVD tomorrow.
Says the NYT, “This mock-documentary imagines the possible outcome after a strange and virulent virus sweeps the world, killing the vast majority of the Earth’s population and reducing the city of San Francisco to only 186 people.”
The movie seems to cover some of the ground between the excellent day-after of 28 Days Later and the blurry long-term aftermath of 12 Monkeys.
Children of Men will be released December 25th.
Set in 2027, it depicts a future “without hope”: no women have been able to have babies for two decades, a plot reminicent of last year’s Aeon Flux.
As of 2002, it was scheduled for release in 2003, suggesting trouble, but it seems to be getting some decent reviews.
A reader seeks to identify a movie about genetic engineering and mutants:
We not remember when we saw part of it on TV. The movie starts out with “perfect” humans rescuing other humans from “mutants”. The mutants were the people who have adverse reaction to shot of genetic engineering. People have to wear a necklace that glow certain color representing a specific DNA. The “perfect” could not mate with others who have the same DNA. No mating with same color wearers. Can you help me find the title of the movie? I have ask several video stores and tried sci-fi links.
Can you help?
Japanese schoolkids battle to the death in the near future.
RATINGS
Futurism — 2
“At the dawn of the millennium,” Japan has “collapsed.” Unemployment is at 15%, and adults fear unruly school kids.
The government implements educational reform laws. Strangely, these include a provision for a “battle royale”: each year a high school class is randomly chosen, shipped to a small island, and forced to fight to the last person.
It does not seem to very well thought-out as a deterrent: the chance element means that students cannot avoid the danger by good behavior, and the battle royale is so poorly publicized that the students have no idea what is happening when they wake up on the island.
The movie attempts no additional exploration of the society that has given rise to this practice.
It would have been more meaningful if the nature of this new Japan had been explored. As in ancient Rome, death-games could have served a purpose, in this case to demonstrate the power of the adult society over rebellious youth.
Entertainment — 7
The class of 40-odd high school students has all the usual teen issues–cliques, crushes, and bullies–but everyone is armed, so the issues are resolved with machine guns, axes, and grenades.
Your tolerance for violence may determine much of your reaction to this movie.
Plausibility — 5
There is no inherent reason that a society could not choose this option, but it seems highly unlikely that even a semi-functioning modern society would go this route. The conditions stated in the prologue are not even vaguely close enough to provoke a reaction this extreme.
Overall rating / ranking — 4.2: 93rd of 121
FORECAST SUMMARY
Event / Likelihood
Totalitarism in Britain by 2020 — very low, even decades after that date
Severe bioterror attack — medium
RATINGS
Overall rating: 5.5 (40th of 119 movies)
Futurism rating: 4
This movie is more about the politics of the present than a vision of the future. It does not attempt a meaningful depiction of how societies actually creep toward tyranny.
Entertainment rating: 7
For a movie about terrorism and oppression, this movie ducks every hard question. “Violence can be used for good,” a character states, but that idea is accepted in some form by every society. The regime depicted is sufficiently odious that resisting it is clearly moral.
Despite its imperfections, the movie is interesting as an unfolding series of mysteries, and occasionally as visual spectacle.
Plausibility rating: 7
Unlikely, but there are no inherent or absolute reasons it could not occur.
(A sidenote: we know where the crowd got its masks, but it was impressive that they managed to assemble the entire Zorro ensemble.)
Approach to the future
Vehicle for views on current events
TOPICS DEPICTED
Tyranny
By 2020, England has fallen under control of a vicious fundamentalist Christian regime, brought to power in a climate of fear created by war and plague.
It happened very rapidly: in 2015 things seem to have been normal, and by 2018 the government was rounding up lesbians and banning Islam and many kinds of art.
The trigger was a bioterror attack that killed 80,000 people, amidst a chaotic and dangerous world situation. (The US has apparently dissolved into civil war.)
Such a calamity would trigger drastic responses, but they would flow from the nature of the society afflicted. A stable Western European nation is unlikely to fall so far, so fast.
Above all, England does not have a reservoir of extremists from which to draw, particularly in the religious sphere. A fundamentalist regime is far more plausible in the US, where the “Christian right” has heavily politicized itself. Even here, only a minority of that group has truly authoritarian tendencies.
A much better depiction of tyranny in England is the Richard III set in an alternate 1930s, when that country had some actual fascists. Christian extremism is more the forte of the US, and is well-depicted in the futurist film The Handmaid’s Tale.
Bioterror
Thousands are killed by an engineered bioterror agent.
This is all too plausible. Biotech capabilities are steadily growing, and the possibility of garage bioterror looms, potentially enabling a situation like that in Twelve Monkeys.