Disasterpunk

The traditional disaster movie is deeply personal: individuals struggling against an environment, human-made or otherwise, that turns against them. The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Airplane!, its dying breath Titanic. Then cinema seemed to collectively zoom out: Independence Day, Mars Attacks, Armageddon, Deep Impact. Suddenly what might have once made for an entire movie comprised a single scene of a disaster epic in which destruction rains down on a massive global scale.

The fantasy of individual cooperation becomes an even more improbable fantasy of global cooperation which conveniently wipes the U.S.’s imperialist slate clean. The classical Emmerichian “monument buster” is an incarnation of the neoliberal impulse to smooth out the possibility of disaster with some vague bullshit about the human condition. People die en mass in this films (in aggressively PG ways), but we only linger on the survivors, and never with the messy aftereffects of trauma. 2012 ends like some sort of children’s version of Noah’s Ark, with a sunrise and hope and nothing even remotely resembling nuanced human emotion.

Movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 teach audiences precisely the wrong lessons of late capitalism. Threats of alien invasion and ancient prophecy abstract the threats of rampant “disaster capitalism”, as Naomi Klein calls it, and meanwhile climate change disaster in The Day After Tomorrow is so profoundly stupid that it may well have set the conversation on the climate back by twenty years. No one is going to be saved by an impassioned speech; that’s all, as Greta Thunberg said last year, “blah blah blah”.

Recently, Greenland seemingly attempted to solve the problem of the disaster movie, avoiding all the notes of Roland Emmerich and instead focusing on the human toll of a global catastrophe: mentally, physically, socially, geographically. Tellingly, parts of the final product feel as much like George Romero’s The Crazies as they do 2012, whose plot Greenland strongly resembles. Greenland is an Independence Day for the era of Very Serious live-action Disney reboots and slow-burn Dune adaptations.

Strikingly, much of the destruction we witness in Greenland is mediated through television screens, as characters witness remote images of disaster admist a struggle against fellow human beings weighed down by knowledge and possibility. The film is all that more intense for following the Jaws–Alien axiom that the monster is scarier the less of it you directly see.

All of that said, Greenland ultimately falls into the same traps as anything by Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay. It is still a movie that has its characters outrunning fireballs and surviving an apocalypse. It’s the same bullshit inspirational humanism, only with an updated paint job.

I like to imagine that Final Destination came about when some shrewd producer realized they could save a few bucks on the slasher movie model by not hiring an actor to play the killer. It’s like the invisible man but without putting bandages all over Claude Rains. The end result is something like disaster horror: characters struggle against the hazards of their environment, but with the generic Spielbergian humanism replaced by a paranoid nihilism more typical of the horror film.

Each film starts the same: we’re introduced to a gallery of stock horror characters, mostly young people, who die in a mass accident — airplane crash, highway pileup, etc — only to pull back and reveal that it was all a life-saving premonition by the main character, who does whatever possible to escape the foreseen future. Eventually the lucky handful of people saved by the protagonist’s vision begin to drop like flies, attributed to Death itself coming for the ones who escaped its original intentions.

Even more so than with most mainstream slasher flicks, the brutal deaths of the characters are the main event. The stock personalities, often obnoxious ones, seems calculated to avoid any investment in any one character prior to grisly demise or even to spur us to root for the characters death in some cases.

The deaths themselves result from a sequence of elaborate coincidences. Natural causes, sure, but Death increasingly works in unnecessarily complicated fashion, crafting lethal Rube Goldberg devices out of everyday materials, if perhaps an unrealistic amount of flammable liquid and moving blades. Because there doesn’t need to be a guy in a hockey mask for you to meet your untimely end, the real villain of Final Destination is the built environment itself, with all its menacing points and edges and weights. The scariest thing in a Final Destination flick is an object set near the edge of a table or shelf.

Cause and effect is the only villain here; it’s like being killed by a physics lesson. The sublime appeal of the Final Destination films is the transfiguration of the everyday world into a massive machine of death that’s malicious yet unnamable and unknowable. Life itself is out to get you, but never in exactly the way you might expect or attempt to avoid. Your avoidance may be part of the machine, anyway.

Final Destination is an extremely pessimistic commentary on the interconnected nature of the modern world, a clockwork doomsday set about by the breakdown of the structures of humanity whose failure is as improbable as it is inevitable. Viewed through a Final Destination lens, all of modernity is just destruction in potentia. And unlike the true disaster movie, where survival is often, though not exclusively, doled out to the worthy, for Final Destination, death is simply a given, regardless of who you happen to be.