While half watching a very bad movie on the Horror Channel in which Las vegas took a beating from some mystical sword or something .....
This prompted me to think about how Hollywood has destroyed many a city, and many of them many times.
Now the following listing is by no means a definitive list, relying as it does on various pages from the web and the research of others but it does give a good flavour of which cities have faced Armageddon via Hollywood ....
..... of course the whole world went splodge, as floods took it in the movies, 2012 and of course Noah.
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| The White House Regularly Gets It In The Neck .... |
This prompted me to think about how Hollywood has destroyed many a city, and many of them many times.
Now the following listing is by no means a definitive list, relying as it does on various pages from the web and the research of others but it does give a good flavour of which cities have faced Armageddon via Hollywood ....
- New York: The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Godzilla, Cloverfield, Knowing, Deluge, King Kong .. in all 69 times.
- Paris: Team America World Police, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Armageddon, Edge Of Tomorrow, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, The Day The Earth Stopped, and The War Of The Worlds .. in all 14 times.
- Washington D.C: Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, Earth versus Flying Saucers .. in all 10 times
- Tokyo: Godzilla (and pretty much all of its sequels) .. in all 25 times.
- Los Angeles: The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, This Is The End, Earthquake, Volcano, War of the Worlds, 2012, Battle: Los Angeles, Skyline, War Of The Worlds 2: The Next Wave, in all 27 times.
- Las Vegas: Destruction Las Vegas, Mars Attacks!, Resident Evil: Extinction,Godzilla .. in all 5 times.
- Chicago: Independence Day, Transformers .. in all 6 times.
- Houston: Independence Day.
- Boston: Knowing.
- San Francisco: The Core, San Francisco, Godzilla (2014),Terminator Genisys, Pixels, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Pacific Rim .. in all 17 times.
- Rome: The Core, 20 Million Miles To Earth
- London: War of the Worlds (original), V For Vendetta,Reign Of Fire,28 Days Later, Shaun Of The Dead, Things To Come .. in all 13 times.
- Philedelphia: World war Z.
- Baltimore: The Sum of All Fears.
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| 2012 .... The World Cops It .... |
..... of course the whole world went splodge, as floods took it in the movies, 2012 and of course Noah.
That's quite a comprehensive list.
ReplyDeleteI note that none of those films had the boldness of Douglas Adams who had the whole World destroyed by the Vogons at the beginning of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
Well apart from the last two. In any case it makes for a rather short movie if the earth and all its inhabitants are destroyed inside the first reel.
DeleteI disagree with cherries on top; A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order. I'd watch a film which starts off destroying the world, goes back to show how events led up to this and then changed the outcome - or not. It's the MOVIES, anything is possible! Even a good one from time to time.
DeleteWhy make the effort to go back to show how events led up to the end of the world, when you can simply play events in chronological order?
DeleteThe best stories start at the end, they're more interesting as they immediately create intrigue and the story becomes a search for events which lead up to what turns out to be the penultimate end of the story because they usually carry on beyond this point and add a twist to the tale!
DeleteChronology is a vegetable which has to be chopped up and cooked in sauce to make a meal.
You sound like Jean-Luc Godard with his assertion that "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order."
DeleteBut if you read the last chapter of a detective story first, there is little point in reading the preceding chapters. You know the butler did it ... but of course you were/are a fan of the TV detective Columbo as I recall, where you knew the villain from the start.
But I wasn't and I take the view that you don't execute the last line of code first in application code ... completing tasks in the right order is how we make sense of things or make them work correctly, else we face chaos.
As an engineer you should appreciate that. As the Mathematician said: “Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.”
Or perhaps you prefer a quote from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
“Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order”
So you can keep your viewing of the end outcome first, before you have run the experiment that created that outcome. Its just quantum nonsense to me. Nature performs a life story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, in that order.
Is this a private debate or can anyone join in? There are some story's that can start at the very end. D.O.A (Dead On Arrival -1950 film noir), comes to mind. A man has been poisoned and is dying and tells police how this came about.
DeleteBut we could hardly have all films in that manner, and indeed this is one of the few movies (and indeed genres), where it works well.
Most movies work best when served in chronological order in my humble opinion.
Orange Male,
DeleteI thought that my culinary reference was a clincher? I guess ratatouille isn't as convincing as is was in the film! And yet, if we do away with time hopping, we'd have to say goodbye to talking rats and spiritual chefs as well, I mean, logically.
As you already pointed out, I enjoy a Columbo, they're brilliant, proof that even a story told chronologically can be good as well. Your argument of a detective novel is an example against a chronological story as they omit the reality of what happened chronologically - who committed the crime - the end reveal is a recreation of what happened before the beginning of the story.
When I was coding we had subroutines and user inputs continually hopped backwards and forwards to them which saved a lot of repetition and made revisions a lot easier. I'm sure there are still common functions in today's code which aren't subject to machine code chronology.
Nature does seem to be chronological but we can't understand it in the same time frame - we have to look into the past to understand the present and hopefully, the future - we don't wait for a natural disaster to happen before taking action.
The scientific method starts at the outcome. It forms a theory about why it had the outcome and recreates the conditions to test the theory, then it does it again, maybe modifies the theory to fit the results then does it all again. It's often necessary to tell a story in different ways to make sense of it.
Film Buff - my comment was very much tongue in cheek and full of false certainties in my arguments .... I fully accept that film story telling can be successful in many forms. DOA as you have pointed out is a very good example of this. Others include Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects ... and Saving Private Ryan.
DeleteVroomfondel old chap. I haven't seen the film you were apparently referencing.
Whilst I still prefer the story to stay in the correct order, as I do not want to know the ending until its reached naturally. I am not immune to the successful device of the ending coming first, as the few examples I have given illustrate.
I don't deny your examples, but perhaps disagree with your statement that '... we had subroutines and user inputs continually hopped backwards and forwards to them ..' .... this still has to follow a logical order and start and with an action or event i.e. at the beginning, and the end.
To bring this back to films, they can have many plot twists whilst still starting and ending in the correct order, much like the code.
Thanks to both of you for the comments!
It never rains but it pours ..... add 'LA Apocalypse (2015)' to the list.
ReplyDelete