I saw Oblivion recently.
It was pretty good, but then pretty much had to see it despite Tom Cruise starring in it.
Oblivion was made by Joseph Kosinski, who directed TRON: Legacy, and I think he has a good eye for design and framing.
The story intrigued me, too; a mystery uncovered in a world wrecked by interstellar conflict.
If it involves the end of the world, I’ll likely give it a shot. These recent years in pop culture have given us a lot of the end times, and I love every morbid bit of it.
The ruins of modern landmarks, the eyeball blood-spilling plagues, the cannibalism and radiation fallout zones. A boom in survivalist skills, a newfound interest in archery, and an overabundance of cargo pants. Seeing the unbounded joy of people when they finally get a hot shower, or happen upon a can of peaches in an abandoned farmhouse.
I’m not including stuff about people trying to save the world, or a world-ending threat tries to invade. Nope. It’s over. The end of the world has happened already. The cataclysm is complete.
We’ve had a lot of zombie stuff, even 10 years after 28 Days Later kicked off the current trend. The Walking Dead is the highest-rated show on cable TV. The movie of the best-selling World War Z is coming soon. Even zombie-film king George Romero got into the end-of-the-world game with Land of the Dead in 2005.
Will Smith’s After Earth is coming out this summer in another post-apocalyptic sci-fi sojourn for him, coming a few years after I Am Legend.
The Book of Eli? Saw it. Y: The Last Man? Read it. Revolution and Defiance are on TV right now. The Road? Read the book, saw the movie. Battlestar Galactica even started with the end of the world(s) and ended with the start of ours.
Fiction isn’t enough, either. Reality TV, after turning over nearly every other subcultural rock of humanity, has moved on to survivalists in Doomsday Preppers. Thanks to them, TEOTWAWKI – the end of the world as we know it – is a household phrase.
Even superhero comics aren’t immune. Swamp Thing and Animal Man just wrapped up a storyline in which the end of the world happens because the heroes lost. One of my favorite musical acts in the 21st century, Gorillaz, seems to make music only about the end of the world. All this extinction in my pop culture? Great. Give me more.
Why are we obsessed with the end of the world?
While I could go on some sociological exegesis about humanity’s underlying desires in imagining its own end, but I’m gonna go fanboy on you and quote a Justice League Unlimited episode instead.
In “The Return,” Lex Luthor tells super-android Amazo that because Amazo will live forever, “you’ll be able to see it all.” It gets to see the end of the evolutionary process. It gets to see where it all goes.
As always, humans are beings trapped in time. The only time each of us knows it our own. The only past, present and future each of us experiences is our own. At least we can know the past that happened before our own lives.
But the future that stretches beyond our dying day? It goes on, and on, after each of us is nothing more than dirt in the ground and dust in the air, ingested by whatever people and things that will be here then.
We want to know how it ends. We always have.
Most likely, you and I will not see the end of the world, or humanity’s extinction. We’ll die, and humanity and the world will keep on spinning.
And as usual, our end comes about from whatever floats around in our time’s culture.
The divine was the original end of the world, from Ragnarok to the Book of Revelation. In a world filled with mystery and a deep understanding of life’s random cruelty, it feels right that humanity’s fate is subject to the whims of gods.
In the 20th century, as the supernatural and divine loosened their grip on the public, we began to see other ways to end the world. With the fall of the atom bomb, we replaced God’s hand with our own.
The nuclear age brought us decades worth of material, from On the Waterfront to Planet of the Apes to A Boy and His Dog and The Day After.
We’ve had the 1970s energy crisis kill us, as in Mad Max. And I’m still convinced the original Transformers cartoon had elements of this, as the Decepticons’ big plot was the eat up all of Earth’s energy. Plus, how does a war of giant robots end in anything other than worldwide planetary devastation?
We’ve had technology kill us all, thanks to Terminator and The Matrix.
We’ve had nature rise against us in The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, ensuring that the pride of man’s dominion over the planet comes before the fall of environmental disregard.
In the age of the AIDS crisis, we had new plagues and world-ending disease in Outbreak and The Stand.
Kurt Vonnegut, genius that he was, preferred to laugh at our presumptuous attitude that we ourselves would end humanity. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the fourth-dimensional aliens of Tralfamadore wipe out the universe by accident.
But I like Oblivion‘s take on the end of the world. It begins with alien invasion, yes, but nature is used against humanity to deliver to deathblow. They blow up the moon, letting gravity, earthquakes, floods and climatic upheaval do the major work.
Kosinski and his special effects crews make it look beautiful, at least, as the fractured satellite sits in a suspended archipelago of broken rocks.
I’ll take it.
Robert Frost, eat your heart out.
