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The World Needs A Hero
by
Tom Maguire
18 April 2004
The
Day After Tomorrow trailer is playing in theaters now and it
looks to be a gloriously overblown big budget end of the world special
effects movie with an ensemble cast and more pseudo science than you can
shake a divining rod at. Although these types of movies have been around
for years - from When Worlds Collide, to Meteor,
to Armageddon - the genre recently thrived thanks in
part to the computer assisted special effect revolution of the 90's and
also due (as TFB cohort Tim accurately pointed out) to the pre Millennium
doomsday predictions of the Y2K bug. Releases like Dante's
Peak, Volcano,Twister, Armageddon,
Deep Impact, and Independence
Day fed off these late 90's fears to various amounts of success.
The influence of Independence Day almost made the alien
invasion film it's own subset of the disaster movie with The
Arrival, Mars Attacks,
Star Trek: First Contact, Men
in Black, and the X-Files movie released in
close proximity to each other. Back in the 90's the economy was good,
crime was down, and jobs were plentiful. It was fun to be scared at the
movies by mother nature wreaking havoc and aliens bringing death from
above. But that was last decade. This decade we have enough real world
fears with the possibility of a George W. Bush reelection or that a son
or daughter might be sent to another country to fight that we don't need
movies to scare us. We need reassurance. Hence the popularity of the Super
Hero film. Thanks in part to the success of X-Men in
the summer of 2000 (and to a lesser degree Blade two
summers before it), Hollywood started providing an escape from reality
that was proven necessary by the enormous success of Spider-Man
in the summer of 2002. A movie like The Day After Tomorrow where
mankind is threated with the onset of a three day Ice Age (!?) seems to
belong to a genre that thrived in the 90's but now seems dated, tired,
and unnecessary.
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