Infected Friday #02: It's the End of the World as we know it (and I feel fine)
Infected FridayPosted by Neil Colquhoun Sat, April 03, 2010 00:01:00infected -verb (to affect so as to influence feeling or action)
friday - noun (sixth day of the week)
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This week I'm gonna talk about the end of the world as we know it.
Every single one of us will shuffle off this mortal coil at some point. One minute you're alive and the next you're gone. Sometimes there's no warning and it comes as a major surprise to the people who know you, other times it can seem like a release - either way the end result is the same. You've gotta hope you get a fair amount of time before the shuffling happens though! How we end our life on the planet and when it occurs varies from person to person but that's on a personal level.
But I don't want to talk about that! No sirree, I want to talk about the ending of the world for large quantities of people. You know what I'm talking about - bye bye lots of you!
Catastrophes affecting the world's population have been portrayed in books and on the silver screen so many times. From natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and meteors to those giant monsters which rampage across the land, the people on this small green planet have suffered so so much!
Hey, all that dying and crying is great and I love lots of the movies on those lists but my favorite way for people to DIE is when there is a plague, epidemic or something which cuts a swathe through us poor unsuspecting souls. I just love the idea of everything coming to a grinding halt: traffic coming to a standstill, the lights in the towns and cities eventually winking out and the plants growing through the tarmac. The empty streets and roads, absent of noise except for the dogs barking in the night roaming free is a powerful image and LIFE WITHOUT PEOPLE gives us an idea of what the world would look like in the days, weeks, months and years afterwards - although in this documentary series there are no people at all!
YES! - Humanity is ravaged by that mysterious plague which wipes out 99 percent of the population, or as near as damn it! And you've guessed it, there's always a merry band of survivors who trudge through a burnt-out ravaged wasteland which was once a Utopia to so many, heading somewhere but probably nowhere. Usually there's something to overcome like a fight for survival against other survivors because the bad guys always find a way to live, don't they? You would think they would have shuffled but no, they hang around.
THE STAND by Stephen King is a great novel about a virus which wipes out 99.4 percent of humanity and is highly recommended (although the mini-series wasn't all that great - still worth a watch but didn't do the book justice!). And King was inspired to write his novel after reading the post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. I also recommend reading "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman, which again deals with a world where there are no people. I prefer if some people survive after the catastrophe but this book is really powerful.
Movies such as "28 Days Later", "The Last Man on Earth", "I Am Legend", "Virus" and "The Road" show us what happens in the aftermath, although there are numerous others which portray this scenario. Personally I found "The Road" bleak but was curious to see it - the scenes where the two main characters are walking beside the fallen trees and in the empty towns were well done and I loved that vision. On a whole, the cinematography was top-notch but the story was so damn slow!
How would you feel about the end of the world? If you're Michael Stipe, then you'll feel fine!
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