Spoil it for me!
Is it a black hole? An asteroid? A comet? Alien invasion?
What kills everyone everywhere at 4:44 in the morning?
Starvation caused by overpopulation?
Sig: My spelling would be better, but my dictionary is broken.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
shareAn article I read some months ago quoted the director as saying he envisioned human destruction of the environment as the cause. That's plausible enough as far as it goes - except for the down-to-the-minute deadline - which is total BS.
It is entirely possible that, since that article, he changed his mind about the cause -- or even decided to leave it deliberately vague. The trailer certainly does nothing to clarify.
As for an atmospheric Armageddon: it might make sense if, perhaps, the atmosphere had become so tainted that people had already BEGUN dying in huge numbers - and then, by extrapolating the mortality rate, we might be able to predict that the last living people would have expired by 4:44am on some particular day.
But that's certainly NOT what the trailer implies; it seems to be saying that we're all going to be just fine until 4:44 - then BANG, we all drop dead. It's hard to imagine a scenario in which that could happen, except by some event of cosmic violence - like an asteroid or some such.
It would have to be some kind of gamma ray burst or something.. Instant global sterilization.
shareThat'd do it, but we're not even entirely sure what causes those - hence, no way to predict them.
shareWe absolutely do know what causes GRB's. They are associated with certain types of Supernovae and cannot be the cause of extinction in this movie because we wouldn't see them coming until it hit.
shareI think he means that we cannot predict what makes a sun go super-nova.
Anyway, even a GRB wouldn't fry the globe at once. Earth is a massive sphere, after all.
I think safe for a huge impact - like a moon-sized object - or the sun exploding there's no way that *all* life on Earth could be killed at exactly the same time.
But I'm willing to accept the impact time of an extinction level event asteroid on the other side of the globe as the end of the world, since everything living afterwards is as good as dead.
Well, there may be a way to predict a supernova burst, or gamma ray hit, if there were some spinning star that was wobbling and then would point to earth at a certain time. Or if just prior to going supernova, there was a set of events that occur a day or a month before, and we noticed that chain of events occurring. (see below). A better, more predictable end would be a rogue planet the size of Mars heading towards the earth (which was how the moon was created), and which sterilized all of earth.
I just looked it supernova's on wikipedia (thanks, wiki people)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova, and it says that neutrinos would arrive in seconds and the electromagnetic signal (meaning: deadly rays) would arrive days later:
"A core-collapse supernova in our Galaxy will bring a wealth of scientific information. The neutrino signal will provide information about the properties of neutrinos themselves and astrophysicists will learn about the nature of the core collapse. One unique feature of the neutrino signal is that it is prompt — neutrinos emerge on a timescale of tens of seconds, while the first electromagnetic signal may be hours or days after the stellar collapse. Therefore, neutrino observation can provide an early alert that could allow astronomers a chance to make unprecedented observations of the very early turn-on of the supernova light curve; even observations of SNe as young as a few days are rare for extra-galactic supernovae"share
["SNEWS: The SuperNova Early Warning System," July 2004,Antonioli, et al.]
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0406214v2.pdf
Not exactly global; only the side of the earth facing the GRB would be sterilized.
These events do not last more than a few seconds. On the other hand a direct hit by a 100 km asteroid would kill us all, but not at the same time. If it hit in the Pacific ocean the rest of the world would have time to say prayers or something. But not much time, since the blast would spread at supersonic speeds.
Fanboy : a person who does not think while watching.share
"only the side of the earth facing the GRB would be sterilized."
Now, THAT'S a movie!
They were saying about the ozone layer in the film and the sky was going green.
Maybe it could be a solar flare or Gamma-ray burst?
www.youtube.com/eastangliauk
I was wondering that as well. It pretty much has to be a cosmic phenomenon such as an asteroid...
shareOzone layer starts disappearing very fast and at 4:44 EST something happens that, combined with little/no ozone, causes everyone to die. It's not explicitly explained in the movie. My guess is a powerful solar flare or a spike in Sun's activity.
All of it is pretty much *beep* when combined with down to the minute, instantaneous cataclysm.
With my feet upon the ground I lose myself between the soundsshare
I just saw it-nocturnus-x7 is right!
"God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways." - Penn Jillette
The Ozone layer is supposed to suddenly "dissipate," but we all know that would take centuries let alone decades of gradual degradation... to the point where everyone had to wear 3000+ SPF just to walk outside... that's what made the premise so bogus, plus the fact that there WAS no end scene of the Earth's destruction... I highly recommend Melancholia over this crapfest.
Look at how happy you are, so carefree. It's almost as if you don't know you're Billy Bush!-Triumph
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"4:44" sounds so much sexier than "sometime in the next thirty years, everyone is going to die from ozone depletion". Makes for a far shorter movie, too. Can you imagine how many intermissions they would have had to have in that theater?
share[deleted]