I know that "In keeping with the novel, the cause of the apocalypse is never explained" but, just for fun, I'd like to hear people's opinions on how they think The End was brought about....nuclear holocaust? Asteroid?
shareI'd go with 'Asteroid' (or some other kind of Impactor).
shareThe author, in his one comment I know of, said it was "probably an asteroid" and also said he had talked with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute about possible conditions after such an event. He clearly wanted readers and audiences to focus on the situation he depicted, not the reason for it. This is a book primarily about human goodness and parental love, not a science fiction story. It is about the end of us as a species; there will be no happy ending. The Boy may live only a little longer, but he is with good people. It is all the Man could hope for -- though he doesn't know what happens. He faces what all parents must face eventually; their children go off into the world, whatever it may be, without them.
shareIn NOT explaining how it happened, that's all people CAN and WILL focus on. While watching this, all I could think about was "what the hell happened." If it was just mentioned in the beginning - people can move on and enjoy the story.
Well. actually, some people were able to focus on what was important about the film. Not evrybody makes or goes to postapocalyptic films for the entertainment value. I'm sorry if you or anyone else missed the point(s) of this one, but there you are. Some films just aren't as simplistic as others, and this is one of the ones you need to think about. I'm not saying it's stupid to get it wrong, just that this isn't the film for those who can only focus on the cause. When you think about it, what does it matter?
You get all you need to know in the first few minutes, in the voiceover, and as the film continues you are aware that this is not likely to have a happy ending. But of course thoe of us who knew the book -- Pulitzer winner a few years ago -- and the author's other work knew what kind of mood and themes to expect.
That is the problem
Depending on WHAT happened; we do not know if the Man's trip with his son is worth the effort he made. If their is no hope he should have found some poison for both of them to end it.
That is one of the main points of the film: there is a choice for people at the end of humanity, either to hope, however unrealistically, or to despair and make a quick end. The Woman chooses one way, the Man another. It's the ilustration of a basic human dilemma, and of the human spirit. What makes obvious sense to you may not make the same sense to a desperate parent or to someone with a different set of values.
In the real world -- and in this film -- choices are not always so simple. Why do you think the Man agonizes over killing or not killing his son?
That was something that didn't quite ring true with me - the idea that 'normal' people would choose to end it when confronted with a hopeless situation. I think, unless you're predisposed to being suicidal, you tend to just trudge on, no matter how futile it is. The survival instinct isn't necessarily rational.
People all around the world today are trapped in hopeless situations, very few of them kill themselves.
"The survival instinct isn't necessarily rational."
Exactly the author's point. I like it that he gives us both sides. This interchange between the couple was expanded in the film, and I especially liked the way the woman says, "Don't you get it?" She is saying that no matter what, she does not want to live in this terrible new world, and the Man refuses to listen until the very end. I think I might share her feeling under her circumstances.
And I am about as unsuicidal as anyone can be in my present life.
That isn't the problem at all. Hope doesn't come from observing what you see and hear, it comes from what you feel inside.
If you want to survive you will try to even if the odds seem stacked against you. Even if you knew what caused the event you still wouldn't be able to tell if the man and the boy could have survived.
Not only that but there were many points in the film where the man contimplated killing himself and the son but didn't because his instinct to survive overrode his fear and grief.
www.spittoon.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Charlie-Hebdo.jpg
That isn't the problem at all. Hope doesn't come from observing what you see and hear, it comes from what you feel inside.
If you want to survive you will try to even if the odds seem stacked against you. Even if you knew what caused the event you still wouldn't be able to tell if the man and the boy could have survived.
Not only that but there were many points in the film where the man contimplated killing himself and the son but didn't because his instinct to survive overrode his fear and grief.
www.spittoon.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Charlie-Hebdo.jpg
That's you. I think the why and what are secondary and not knowing makes the horror of what is happening all the greater.
shareI briefly wondered what had happened, but it didn't preoccupy me like it did you. This obviously isn't the film for you. Maybe try something a bit less challenging?
shareSince nobody appears to be sick or dying of radiation exposure, I'd discount nuclear war.
So it's down to asteroid impact vs. supervolcano eruption (the two causes of the big mass extinctions in geological history - apparently the dinosaurs got a double-whammy of both at the end of the Cretaceous).
Well as you can see in the film everyone is sick and/or dying of something and fallout is carried by the wind so that some areas of the world may not get a deadly does until much later after a war.
Even then it could have been a limited nuclear exchange or even an asteriod strike that caused an accidental nuclear exchange AND several nuclear power stations to leak radiation.
To be quite honest you can take your pick.
I have THREE black belts in FULL ON PSYCHO!
Well as you can see in the film everyone is sick and/or dying of something
Even then it could have been a limited nuclear exchange or even an asteriod strike that caused an accidental nuclear exchange AND several nuclear power stations to leak radiation.
This would have devastated life locally but not globally. You'd need all-out nuclear war to wipe out most of the life on the planet.
For sure but see this is where being at the mercy of the percpective of the mans narrative sort of leaves some things open.
He knows the country he is in or at least the land he dwells in is finished but at the least he hopes not everywhere is like the dead landscape he ventures through.
He assumes that based on what he has seen with his eyes that the world is finished but he can't possibly know for sure it is as he hasn't seen anywhere further than he is physcially able to walk.
This is why he still has hope.
So a limited nuclear exchange could still be the setting for the film.
I have THREE black belts in FULL ON PSYCHO!
Just sick and dying of hunger and respiratory illness due to all the crap in the air. My money was always on one or a series of meteor impacts.
...then whoa, differences...
An asteroid just does not seem likely. There would be advance warning for one big enough to cause an ELE.
And the old man mentioned that there had been warnings that everyone ignored but he saw it coming.
Also in the novel there were radiation zones and people had to where gas masks.
Nuclear radiation is not as bad as it is made out to be by all the anti-nuke propaganda. People living just 20 miles from Ground Zero in Hiroshima lived years after exposure. Cancer rates went up a ton but death from acute radiation poisoning were done within a week of the blast.
So a nuclear exchange that triggered a global catastrophe is more likely.
Just recently a Russian military *beep* suggested that dropping a nuke on Yellowstone would be more than enough to destroy the whole U.S.
An asteroid just does not seem likely. There would be advance warning for one big enough to cause an ELE.
That's not even nearly slightly true.
One of biggest fears about asteroids is that humans can only moniter a small fraction of what is out there. We could fesibly find ourselves in situation where the planet is struck by an extinction causing asteriod and all we would know about it is when the sky darkens.
Also it doesn't have to be one huge object it could be a series of meduim to small shards that pepper the planet and cause humans to die as a speices.
Nuclear radiation is not as bad as it is made out to be by all the anti-nuke propaganda. People living just 20 miles from Ground Zero in Hiroshima lived years after exposure. Cancer rates went up a ton but death from acute radiation poisoning were done within a week of the blast.
What a confused and stupid statement.
Of course radition/fall out is as bad as we think. CND didn't create their own information based on being "pinko commie left wingers". They based their objections of the bomb on many different people one of which was Carl Sagan.
He was one of the first to put foward the notion of a nuclear winter. To say "nuclear radiation" is not that bad because acute cases of radition sickness went down is dumb...because:
1)
It obviously would go down because those who have died...died. If 99 out of 100 people died of radiation sickness there would be 1 person left if that person survived the cases of death via radition sickness would have gone down considerably.
2)
You can't say fallout is that bad if cancer rates sky rocket.
Making the comparision to one single atomic bomb explosion way back in 1945 is invalid. Due to that it was of small yeild and the technoligy was in it's infancy.
If we had a war tomorrow not only would we be facing weapons that were far more powerfull and far nastier but would produce a shroud of death that would half a leathal half life of hundreds if not thousands of years.
Not to mention things like Neutron bombs with are made have a shorter have life in terms of fallout but a far higher lethality in the short term. Made to leave buildings intact but kill people these things could kill millions in weeks.
Just recently a Russian military *beep* suggested that dropping a nuke on Yellowstone would be more than enough to destroy the whole U.S.
The fact remains however that even in the chilled depths of the Cold War it was never the Russians plan to start a nuclear war let alone destroy all life on earth.
Besides both sides have speculated if they should create a doomsday weapon.
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I'm for the super volcano idea. That there was an eruption somewhere in the world that covered the world in ash.
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I'm thinking the catastrophe was caused by the earth being hit by either a large asteroid or a series of meteors. The impact of either the asteroid or meteors probably caused the earth to get knocked off its axis, which in turn has made the planet to move farther and farther away from the sun. This would certainly explain why the weather is getting increasingly cold with each passing day.
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I vote Yellowstone, frankly. That would fit with the idea of the Man and the Woman having no warning at all of the impending apocalypse.
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This is what the author said in an interview with Wall STreet Journal:
CM: A lot of people ask me. I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.
It was probably a large meteor impact event somewhere on the other side of the world. Huge amounts of debris and "earth-spall" from the collision would get blown into a partial orbit, and then it would all fall back down through the atmosphere over the course of just a few days. The friction from all that debris burning up on re-entry would superheat the air up to the point where it's so hot that forests and other easily-combustible materials would spontaneously catch on fire all over the world. That's why all the trees and cities are spontaneously combusting at the beginning of the movie
shareI think I read something similar about meteor impacts -- it would superheat the atmosphere and cause massive fires, then the ash would cause a nuclear winter.
All of this would explain why everything looked burned and there wasn't anything left living.
It was a big party....guys got drunk and started lighting bottle rockets....things just got out of hand.
shareI've always wondered if the man and most people knew themselves what had happened. I've felt from reading the book that people weren't entirely sure, so nuclear war was mostly out. I would think rising tensions alone between major world powers would have been evident and well known, hence people would have well known what had happened. It seemed like something sudden and something that some people believed was coming while others didn't. Maybe a meteor impact that the government tried to hide or deny to keep people calm. I also felt, especially from the movie that maybe the man was something of a prepper or had taken some steps before hands to be prepared for something. Maybe just the amount of supplies he seemed to have- I don't know.
shareI would have guessed there would have been enough hardened government resources that there would have been some kind of announcement on radio as to what happened.
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