Quote:
Originally Posted by BST
How long are we going to portray present-day as "post/911"?
Pearl Harbor was just as bad, if not worse, to my parents' generation but, they moved on from it.
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The problem though, Pete, is that this movie unlike war movies in which the battle scenes are important for the purpose of telling a good story surrounding the *people* or in terms of making a point about historical recreation, is a movie that is made for one purpose only which is to celebrate and revel in the levels of destruction that can be shown on-screen. I will plead guilty to having once been fascinated by this kind of moviemaking, but post-9/11 I look at the impersonal way in which destruction is shown on-screen to get the people to go "Oooooooh!" or "Awesome!" with no regard for the magnitude of human life that has to get snuffed out if this sort of thing were to happen, and now it absolutely turns my stomach. I can never watch "Armageddon" or "Deep Impact" or even "Independence Day" again because I saw the real event in graphic detail on that day unfold and I have refused to let myself forget the magnitude of what happened.
Now this is not necessarily a blanket condemnation of the whole disaster genre because *if* a disaster movie at least serves up an interesting storyline with good actors who elevate the experience as a whole, that can still be entertaining and you are still first and foremost locked into the nature of the overall drama and not just impatiently wondering "When does the next disaster scene happen???" "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno" I can still watch because there, I can at least watch actors of much greater talent than the ones we have today like Gene Hackman, Steve McQueen, Ernest Borgnine, William Holden etc. do their best to make more with the material and the fact that we had better writers and directors on those projects who were not by nature FX oriented people at least meant the scripts weren't so brain dead as today's FX movies are. The disaster was the grabber for the *story*. These movies only exist for the FX scenes with characters totally unmemorable in contrast to the ones from the earlier generation of disaster films, and that only drives home the overall exploitative nature of these kinds of movies in the post-9/11 period from my standpoint.
