The apocalypse can wait

It turns out that we are not facing a common apocalyptic saga, the kind that culminates in the arrival of some Marvel superhero to tell us (pay attention to the message!) that the planet is in pieces, but a new era of happiness is heralded… Which is as if to say: the spectator is not offered the simplistic gratification of an outcome whose only moral (indeed, moralistic) function would be to erase the disturbance with which it all began.

So let’s talk about space. The more the experts in the White House emergency room contemplate the abstract route of the apocalyptic missile (the screens they have at their disposal are really a way of doing politics), the more the spatial coordinates become diluted in a terrible generalization: the “beyond” of the impact site becomes confused with the “here” of the respective observation. Or even: the globalization in which we live (starting with military globalization) has generated a perverse ecumenism in which all differences are equivalent in a single way of living – and, of course, dying.

And let’s not forget time. With a rare agility in the cinema of our present, the script written by Noah Oppenheim, although seeming to enunciate a cycle of events that can only have one ending (the explosion of the missile), works, after all, as an endless machine for relaunching the panic that our nuclear civilization has generated. Thus, when the fatal 19th minute is reached, the story “interrupts”, goes back and starts again in another place, with other characters. In other words: the fatal count returned to zero, although maintaining the deadly barrier of 19 minutes…

We are therefore reminded of the argumentative art of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (for example, in The Barefoot Countessa title from 1954) in which time repeats itself like a ghost of its own measurements – one can escape from one space to another, but it is not possible to open the door and escape the methodical flow of time. And we can also remember this genuinely visionary film that is War games (1983), by John Badham, with the young Matthew Broderick in one of his first roles, in which the civilization of the virtual (understand: computers) merges all human actions into an idea of ​​“game”, precisely, including the unspeakable experience of death.

Kathryn Bigelow’s film is all the more engaging because, in fact, what we see and hear in it – from military control rooms to the coded speeches of politicians – has become part of our daily television lives. Not even missing is the presidential helicopter in which, in this case, the US president, played by Idris Elba, is taken to a safe place. In other words: the turmoil in our space and the zigzags of our time force us to seriously rethink the uses of the word “realism”.

Journalist