The Case for the End of Movie Days

I watched 2012 last night, which is that fairly slow and ponderous movie about the end of the world as we know it, which I always find amusing - especially as by the end we are kind of meant to be rooting for the monied elite who have left the huddled masses to die in their ignorance of the impending armageddon.

I find these kind of films fascinating, the many ways in which the world is meant to end. Meteor impacts were the thing a decade or so ago, and last night there was also the screening of the other popular extra terrestrial method of mankind's annihilation - extra terrestrials themselves, in their big, White House destroying Independence Day space ships.

But it is also fascinating to see how the movie makers manipulate (or attempt to) the audience to make us root for heroes who are, obviously, going to be saved from disaster that must, by definition, cause the near-extinction of the human species. Back to 2012, the fact that [spoiler alert] salvation lay in deepest China (well, I think it was in Tibet, so perhaps your politics will dictate how "Chinese" you view that; but I digress) and that we were expected to root for 5 westerners to make it over the bodies of millions of other Americans and a billion-odd Chinese was, for me a little hard to take.

Which probably explained why I fast-forwarded through a lot of the "emotional bonding" scenes, so that I could just enjoy the scenes of death and destruction without the added complication of battling attempted-manipulative nausea. Truth be told, I really appreciate the imagination and special effects that goes into portraying how we are extinguished with a bang rather than a whimper - I just don't want the need for movies to try and inject a "human element" into this kind of story to get in the way of my enjoyment.

Verdict: Death, destruction, degradation... that's tonight's family viewing on Television New Zealand. And what fun we will have. Lots of deaths out of the human population.