FILM ANALYSIS

Answering the questions....

Films that I have been looking at:

• Armageddon
• Deep Impact
• 2012
• The day after tomorrow
• The day the earth stood still
• Mars attacks
• World Invasion

Armageddon and Deep Impact are similar, they are both science-fiction disaster-dramas, in both films the threat is a gigantic asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth;

both stories need heroes, in one case it is a crew that is supposed to destroy the asteroid, in the other it is more dramatic as the hero is not willing to survive without his girlfriend...

in the end one of the main figures of the story dies in both films, the real heroes....

Interesting fact: what makes Deep Impact a little different is that the government decides to build a refugee shelter for 1 million people, 200,000 people are already selected: scientists, teachers, soldiers, people to build a new government...and 800,000 can win a lottery to get a place as well...only if they are 50 or under though!

2012

threat: the temperature of the earth´s core is increasing

same as in Deep Impact, a certain amount of people is chosen to board arks that are build to rescue them; additional to this tickets are also being sold for those arks for the wealthy private sector, as one ticket costs 1 billion euros per person;

there is one person who knows what is going to happen, strangely behaving,trapped from the world outside...of course none is listening to him...

those who know of the threat,scientists, and wanted to tell the public were murdered...always trying to give the appearance that everything is alright.

The day the earth stood still and World Invasion are more of a sci-fi story than the others;

we get to see spaceships, mysterious objects and robots, loads of special effects, loads of technical inventions;

aliens want to take over Earth and destroy humankind; always try to save humans, evacuation of civilians;

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED:

• films deal with what humans are scared of, especially things that can not be controlled anymore such as natural disasters
• additional scare-factor: a threat that we do not know: a threat from another planet; natural disasters are in some way still "understanable" while something coming from another world is so alien to humans that it simply has to be scary
• there is always someone who knows about the threat, who knows the facts, but either is not allowed to tell the people, or nobody believes him
• loads of special effects: most exciting to me: cities, buildings being destroyed