Title: Last Days on Earth Movie Review
Genre: TV/Infotainment
Director: George Kachadorian
Release: (2006)
In the words of the late, great Jack Buck, “Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!” And while he may have meant it in a slightly different context, I mean it’s time for us all to actually go crazy. Because the prophecies of Mickey Knox are coming nigh and the whole world’s coming to an end, Mal. Whether it be from above, below or ourselves, our extinction-level event is creeping ever closer each day and soon humans – like the dinosaurs before us – will exist only as inaccurately reconstructed skeletons in super-cockroach museums. At least that’s what Elizabeth Vargas says. And since she’s both attractive and on television, I am inclined to believe anything she says.
In Last Days on Earth, Vargas sends interns and other lowly assistants all over the world to interview some of the foremost experts on the likelihood and potential impact of a number of different possible doomsday scenarios that might one day, mercifully, finally bring an end to Mind of Mencia on Comedy Central. (No price is too high.) Beginning with what they’ve determined to be the “seven” (more on this in a moment) most likely, our final days as a species are imagined and re-imagined according to the specific effects of each different event, in order from the most remote possibility (exploding nearby star) to the one that is considered our most immediate threat (climate change). Without giving away all of the actual events, I’ll tell you that from beginning to end we’re looking at a total of three threats from space, one threat from the Earth, three threats from our own doing and one that could end up coming from either Earth or man. (And, yes, I know that adds up to eight. I don’t know why they go out of their way to present it as a “Top Seven” list and then gloss over the fact that there are clearly eight, but they do. The first two are kind of presented together but are completely different things.)
So what do we make of all this? Hell if I know, go ask your priest. (Or rabbi, or imam, or bartender.) All I know about is the movie (for lack of a better term) itself. As far as that goes, it was pretty interesting … mostly. So let’s get the “pretty interesting” stuff out of the way first. Because I didn’t realize when I clicked it into my Netflix queue (based on title and a quick scan of the first line or two of summary alone) that this was actually just a DVD release of a 20/20 special made for ABC and The History Channel, it’s difficult for me to really evaluate the content and presentation of it too critically. Since it makes no secret about the fact that it was made for television, I feel like there’s really no call for me to criticize everything about it that feels like it was made for television. If this were a wide release film, the computer imagery used to visualize the sight of a gamma ray blast from space burning away the entire atmosphere of the Earth and microwaving everything on it might seem a little low-budget, but for a made for TV “news” program, it was actually pretty effective. Beyond that, many of the interviews and theories made for fascinating nuggets for the audience to take away with them and mull over occasionally while still continuing to fritter away their last days in the deadening rut of their daily lives. Most of the potential scenarios you can probably guess, but a few will probably genuinely interesting surprises. But there is one that is definitely not, and that is where Last Days on Earth veers almost catastrophically into the extinction of its own credibility.
I’ve already mentioned that climate change (more specifically, climate change as a result of man-made global warming) was presented as the number one threat on their list. Even as someone who generally believes in the threat of this type of climate change and the common sense of making a few simple changes in our daily lives and the ways we do business to ward off against it, that problem as presented here was something that even I walked away from feeling like I had just been slapped with a white glove of shameless propaganda. After sixty minutes of being steadily drawn into the conversation by the opinions of scientists and scholars from across the globe on the potential impact of such events as a nearby gamma ray burst or a historically overdue global plague of some kind, as well as being emotionally roused by the visual imagery of a planet destroyed and littered with lifeless bodies used repeatedly to underscore the effect of each, the last twenty minutes suddenly became paid commercial advertisement for An Inconvenient Truth, with Vargas just lobbing softball questions at special guest “scientist” Al Gore and doing man on the street interviews with sweet old ladies whose garden flowers are blooming three weeks early this year. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything in the first three quarters of the show was only there to build up to and heighten the emotional wallop of the global warming piece. They spent an entire hour making the viewer think seriously about plague, famine, nuclear holocaust, and other possibilities for total human annihilation and then the last twenty minutes basically saying, “… but the effects of global warming are worse than all of them combined, and it’s happening right now!”
Again, I’m not disputing anything about climate change here, or even the very real impact it may have on our future as a species. All I’m disputing here is the idea that this movie/program/special/whatever didn’t have an agenda about it from the beginning. It’s pretty obvious when you do seven straight segments loaded with international Ph.Ds citing specific numbers and verifiable evidence (i.e., observable phenomena in space, the physical remains of previous events, etc.) and then close the show with a puff piece featuring the casual observations of Ma and Pa Kettle and a fawning celebrity interview that stops just short of an autograph request. In the legal world, it’s often noted that the appearance of impropriety can be just as damaging as the actual thing. It’s the same thing here. I’m not saying they actually conspired with Al Gore to give him the free publicity, or even that anything they present about the threat of climate change is factually wrong. What I am saying is that the appearance of those things undermines their entire credibility. And for that, I’m going to go outside right now and idle my car for the next eighty minutes to punish the Earth for the time I spent watching this manipulative piece of preachy trickery. That’ll teach it.
Grading
Story: N/A
Acting: N/A
Visuals: B+
Originality/Innovation: N/A
Enjoyability: B- (All in all, it was pretty interesting for sixty of the eighty minutes.)
Overall: B
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