Apocalypse Day: a disaster without fireworks …

7 – Day of the End of the World

(Greenland / US, 2020)
Director: Rick Roman Waugh
Guion: Mitchell LaForton, Chris Sparling and Rick Roman Woo
Duration: 119 minutes
Interpretation: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Del Floyd, David Denman, Scott Glenn E. Claire Bronson
Premiere on Amazon Prime Video

Ago Godzilla (1954) to the contemporary 2012 (2009) and Earthquake: San Andreas Fault (2015), cinema works, with care and perseverance, to create an iconography of disasters governed by show and astonishment. It does not matter whether it is from natural causes or from a failed scientific experiment; The despair of screaming and running, and the political and military interests that take precedence over the welfare of the majority, are the order of the day at the audiovisual end of the world. From (almost) all those common spaces dispense Day of the End of the World, A strange new collaboration between former acrobatic turned director Rick Roman Woo with Gerard Butler afterward The president is under fire. If the attempt to take over the Capitol in early January, with Trump supporters in Sioux uniforms walking around the White House, overcame the absurdity suggested by this movie, here the duo is practicing an involuntary maneuver in the opposite direction, as it centralizes the narrative on a human scale. , With dramatic peaks highly visible that doesn’t mean embrace epic or grandeur.

Day of the End of the World It has mobility but it’s not overheating. On the contrary: for those who expect fireworks and ceremonial self-awareness, for example, the Roland Emmerich cinema, perhaps the greatest specialist in imagining the catastrophic fates of the planet, this movie can give them a little taste without overdosing on civic heroism or giving high speeches before Civil servants. Also, there is no patriotic feeling that stems from actions or villains, as human neglect is not a cause. The closest thing is to the nests of “evil” in these men and women who are able to do anything in the face of the approaching disaster, even inflicting public harm on those close to them. This is not the case with John (Butler, who seems to have hit the shoots with three liters of energy drink for breakfast), a famous engineer who recently broke up as a result of infidelity, and who left before work to watch TV with his son and ex-wife (Morena Baccarin, best known for her work in the seasons) The first of the series homelandHow does part of the comet that will pass close to Earth decay upon entering the atmosphere.
But the show turns into a tragedy when it generates far more reach, far from the assumptions of space agencies, than does some of those wrongly called “shooting stars”. The biblical lineage gap where Florida was until then the first indication of a complete catastrophe: the central part of the comet will collapse somewhere in Africa and generate a shock wave very similar to the one that toppled by the dinosaurs millions of years ago. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to assume that if those gigantic animals were to charge, they would do the same with every glimmer of life on the surface. The movie can go as well Profound effect The Disaster Climb up a group of astronauts to save the potatoes. but not. What is there is a file Accepting disaster This was confirmed when John received a call and was informed by the answering machine that he had been chosen to undertake a space flight with his family towards a shelter in Greenland, carried out during the most dangerous phase of the Cold War.
As if the total extermination was not enough, once they crossed the airport checkpoints, they discovered that their asthmatic son had forgotten his medication in the car, forcing John to follow his steps to save him. A heroic act, yes, but an act of ordinary, that ends with a separation between them: as in Steven Spielberg’s version of Worlds warIt is about an ordinary man (or ordinary as a butler can be) confronting the exceptional and not motivated by duty but by love, loyalty, and protective instinct. It is true that some situations are excessive in the context of the story if you want to be “moderate”, but this is because of the real interest in its characters and the assertiveness with which she leaves everything alien to her out of the picture, that Waugh succeeds in conveying the disturbing feeling that the end of the world may be around the corner. Or lower.